Abstract

This study attempted to distinguish the atmospheric characteristic of cloud forest quantitatively in order to classify their typical features. The nine weather stations were installed in different sites divided into three specific areas: (1) four cloud forest areas (Duan Hok, Dadfa, Mt. Nom and Doi Inthanon stations), (2) two lowland rainforest areas (Huilek and Mt. Nan Headquarters stations) and (3) three coastal areas (Walailak University, Khanom and Nakhon Si Thammarat stations). The atmospheric data consisted of temperature, the percentage of relative humidity and solar radiation collected from July 2006 to April 2010. The bimodal distribution and power law distribution were used to analyze parameters and classify atmospheric characteristics of the obtained data then classified them by cluster analysis. The results showed that those study sites can be classified into two groups: (1) cloud forest and (2) lowland rainforest and coastal area. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.