Met office evaluates performance
The saga of the Phantome illustrates the importance of early and accurate weather forecasting. And while no one would suggest that Belize’s own meteorologists are anything less than first rate, a series of unfortunate events left the Met office significantly impaired during the recent crisis. This afternoon News Five’s Stewart Krohn spoke with former Chief Meteorologist Carlos Fuller, who although on secondment to a climate change project, was among those forecasters who worked in shifts around the clock in Ladyville. He was asked how so many professionals, both here and abroad, could be so wrong about the path of Hurricane Mitch.
Q: “Why did so many forecasters get it wrong?”
Carlos Fuller, Meteorologist
“Stewart, I think we need to take into account that for the long term forecast we were wrong but for the short range forecast we were right. We kept saying that this hurricane will be in the vicinity for the next day or two and when it does start to move it’s going to move toward the northwest. And we kept saying for the next twenty four hours it’s gong to remain generally in the same area, drift about, but it will start moving toward the northwest. But we kept saying that over and over and over because that’s what our models were saying. We issued warnings from Cancun all the way down the Yucatan over to the Nicaraguan/Honduran border. It eventually made landfall in that area and that is the case with all hurricanes forecasted. It’s a large area and it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact spot.
Now in the case of Mitch we had a system that was very erratic and that is the way all slow moving storms operate. If it was moving at fifteen miles per hour we would have gotten the forecast dead on track, but it is these ones that are moving less than ten miles per hour, especially five miles per hour; their movement is erratic and could go in any which direction.”
Q: “Carlos, I understand that the Sunday before the hurricane a lightning bolt landed near the Met office and in effect crippled virtually all of your computers. So by the time the storm rolled in you were virtually just like the rest of us, that is getting your information from the Weather Channel and just from bulletins in Miami. Is that true and what effect did that have on your forecast?”
Carlos Fuller
“That was partially true. We did not have as much information as we would have liked to have had. Fortunately for us although we lost one of our satellite receivers we had another one that we could have used, so we were able to get live satellite imagery.
Secondly, we were still able to talk to Miami and interrupt what they were saying. In fact I have many bulletins on my desk right now which indicate that after conversing with us they made changes because we knew more of our global conditions than they knew up there.
But certainly we suffered a tremendous loss of our communication equipment, of our primary Internet computer and one of our satellite receivers and also our upper air station which crippled the U.S. somewhat because that was their primary upper air station to get data in the upper atmosphere. By losing ours they had lost one. And because of budget cuts they had cut out many in the Caribbean and therefore they were really hurting for more data. They did not have enough information to feed their models which resulted in a poorer model output which affected our forecasting of Mitch.”
Q: “Today is the second of November, can we breathe easy now or should we still keep an eye out for hurricanes?”
Carlos Fuller
“I think we still need to keep our eye out. Two things: Because of the La Niña the entire hurricane season has been pushed back further than normal. The early part of the season, June, July was very quiet and it was only in August that activity picked up. So we are actually running above normal where hurricanes are concerned. So our season may have been pushed back a bit.
Secondly, in November the peak of the hurricane activity shifts to the Gulf of Mexico and the northwestern Caribbean so this is where if anything does come this will be the zone. It’s old cold front that come, linger in the area, stay there a day or two and then start to take on tropical characteristics. That’s what we need to look at now.”
Fuller noted that major repairs need to be made to the Met office including better electrical and communications systems, as well as improvements in the building itself. One glaring problem noted for years is that the only way to go from the building’s ground floor offices to its upstairs forecast section is to take an outside staircase, not exactly an easy trick in a hurricane.
