More Weather Stations for Immediate Data for Met Office

The Belize Meteorological Service is enhancing its real time rainfall tracking. The Met Service had written to the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility asking for support to expand Belize’s weather service. They got a positive response, and forty-three thousand US dollars to procure thirty additional rain gauges and fifty-two temperature sensors and supporting equipment. Chief Meteorologist, Ronald Gordon spoke to News Five about how this will help during extreme thunderstorms and even hurricanes.

Ronald Gordon

Ronald Gordon, Chief Meteorologist

“We are able to tell you in real time what amount of rainfall is falling over a particular location, and we’re able to provide alerts to the public and that’s how we issue our flood alerts or flood warnings and watches, based on the rainfall accumulated over a period of time. So, for example, like we saw last week, we were able to look at Belize City and see the amount of rainfall occurring over a very short period of time. And knowing the conditions in Belize City, we’re able to alert residents in particular areas of the possibility of flooding from that amount of rainfall. Having these weather stations certainly will provide more data for us to be able to monitor the climate trends across the country. In the early days, we did not have automatic weather stations. We had a network of manual stations in which we had weather observers going out to read once per day, and that would be at nine in the morning. With our automatic weather stations, we’ll have data come in to us in real time at least every fifteen minutes, so the coverage is bigger; we have a wider area of coverage.”

The assistance from the CCRIF is subsequent to one for a hundred thousand U.S dollars in 2017, also for the installation of weather sensor equipment.