He said it was essential to learn from those mistakes to prevent another such calamity.

“I tried my best to save those coastal communities,” he wrote in the book. “But there were many weaknesses during Nargis, particularly our inability to relocate people in time. In fact, the infrastructure itself was the weakness.”

U Tun Lwin was born on Jan. 17, 1948 — less than two weeks after the country declared its independence from British colonial rule — to middle-class parents in Kalar, a village in central Burma .

He attended elementary and high school in the city of Mandalay, and at 17 began working as a clerk at the local weather department. He attended Florida State University on a scholarship, majoring in meteorology.

He returned to Myanmar after graduation and began working as a forecaster at a television station, according to accounts of his life in local newspapers. After another round of meteorological studies — a master’s at Florida State and a doctorate at Yangon Universit y — he joined the country’s Department of Meteorology and Hydrology.

When Cyclone Nargis hit in May 2008, Dr. Tun Lwin was the department’s director general. In his memoir he said forecasting the storm’s power had been difficult in part because the country had no surveillance radar.

As a substitute, he analyzed satellite imagery that he received every 30 minutes from a meteorological center in Singapore, then used a ruler and a compass to calculate the storm’s intensity, according to an account in The Irrawaddy, an online news organization.

As Nargis approached, “I spent my days and nights at the office to follow the storm,” he wrote in the book. “I rarely slept, apart from some naps.”