Met office will have new radar in ’05

This year’s hurricane season may have been kind to Belize, but our recent memories of Mitch, Keith, Chantal, and Iris are still too fresh to be easily forgotten. And while mankind has not yet devised a way to divert or shrink the deadly storms, scientists are at least improving their means of tracking them. Beginning in 2005 Belize will be among four Caribbean countries to benefit from some new technology with the installation of an advanced weather radar. Under a twenty-eight million Belize dollar project, financed by the European Union, Belize, Barbados, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago will all receive the radars and buildings to house them, along with training for operators and maintenance personnel. The equipment, which has Doppler capability to measure wind speed and rainfall intensity, will work along with other stations in the region to create a more complete picture of weather patterns and improve the capacity to track hurricanes. The memorandum of understanding for the project was signed today by the CARICOM Secretary General in Guyana and will be initialled in Belize on Thursday morning by Minister of Natural Resources Johnny Briceño at a ceremony coinciding with the opening of a meeting of the Caribbean Meteorological Council at the Radisson Fort George Hotel.