Meteorologist: Extreme storms will become less rare

After the frightening experience of the last two weeks we can’t help but wonder what’s going wrong with our weather. According to one of our most experienced meteorologists, extreme events like Dean and Felix may become a fact of life, not only for Belize, but for anyone living in hurricane prone areas.

Carlos Fuller, Meteorologist/Deputy Director, CCCCC
“We have periods of high activity and periods of low activity and we are certainly in a period of high activity which began back in 1995 and we know it is going to last twenty to twenty-five years. So we have several more years of this to occur before we go back into a lower cycle.”

Jacqueline Godwin, Reporting
Although we are just entering the height of the hurricane season in the past three weeks, Belizeans have had to stock up on supplies and evacuate due to the threats of hurricanes Dean and Felix. The systems surprised weather experts with their rapid intensification and speed, and that they kept on a westerly track at a time of the year when historically most systems formed in June through August travel in a northerly direction.

Carlos Fuller
“With climate change we’re seeing a warming of both the atmosphere, the land and the sea and hurricanes get their energy from the sea. So if the Caribbean is warm than it normally is then you would expect stronger hurricanes and that is exactly what occurred in the Caribbean.”

Deputy Director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, Meteorologist Carlos Fuller says they are also noticing that hurricanes are forming farther south.

Carlos Fuller
“About ten years go we saw one develop in the south Atlantic where your professor would tell you that never occurs.”

For Belize, already bracketed by two category five hurricanes in two weeks, the news is not good.

Carlos Fuller
“Unfortunately, the two hurricanes have been category five hurricanes. They made landfall as category five hurricanes. It is the first time in history and we have data going back to 1885. This has never happened.”

Fuller says what has been contributing to the strange weather pattern is a high pressure system known as the Bermuda High that kept both Dean and Felix on a westerly track.

Carlos Fuller
“We can start to pray that the Bermuda high will weaken, so that the systems that do form, and they will form, will go more into the Atlantic as they did in the past. The one inhibiting factor that could occur would be if for example, an El Niño were to develop quickly in the Pacific, which would then tend to move the activity more into the Pacific than the Atlantic, but we are certainly not seeing that right now. So the outlook is right now for people, keep the plywood that you’ve been using and look out. We could easily get a third threat.”

According to Fuller the national meteorological service has gotten much better at monitoring and forecasting hurricanes.

Carlos Fuller
“The international coordinating mechanism is much better and observing systems are much better than what we had before. We now have weather satellites that are now providing high resolution imagery, up to one kilometre resolution every eight minutes. We have a network of hurricane hunting aircraft that go into the hurricanes and find out the intensity pressures and so on. We now have new aircraft that are doing high resolution probes around the hurricane, finding out the environment in which the hurricane is moving.”

“When we go back in the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, we did not even have a weather forecasting office. Now we have a national meteorological service with a full compliment of meteorologists, forecasters and various levels of technicians.”

Fuller admits that while there have been improvements there is still more work to be done.

Carlos Fuller
“We need more wind, monitoring equipment, stations around the country so that for example, when Dean made landfall just north of Chetumal a couple weeks ago, if we had had wind recorders in Corozal, in San Pedro, in Caye Caulker, in Orange Walk Town, we would know exactly what was the strength of winds that occurred there. Similarly for flooding, we have a few river gauging network stations around the country, but we need to put many more so that we can be able to provide warnings as the river is rising, what is the rate of rise and at what time it will reach further downstream. We need to replace some of the staff who have retired or have been transferred over the past few years. we need to start at the ground level again because the young meteorologists have been promoted over the years, at the higher level. We need to start continuing that process of bringing people from the bottom and letting them rise up, and we need to get that going right away.”

The Belize Weather Bureau continues to operate without a radar system that hopefully through a fifteen million U.S. dollar European Union Regional project will be ready for next year’s hurricane season.

The 2007 hurricane season has been forecast to be an active one with a total of fifteen storms, ten of which are predicted to become hurricanes.