Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, November 25th, 2008 – The Caribbean Meteorological Organization (CMO) today announced that the new Doppler Weather Radar installed at Brasso Venado in the district of Tabaquite in Trinidad is ready for official commissioning.
This is one of four new Doppler weather radars in the English-speaking Caribbean as part of a €13.2 million (approx TT$ 115 million) Project being implemented by the Caribbean Meteorological Organization. Construction of the 20-metre reinforced concrete tower at Tabaquite started in 2007 and was completed early in 2008, following which the weather radar was installed and tested. Two of the three other radars have also been installed. The radar in Barbados is also ready for commissioning, the radar in Belize has been installed and is under test, while the radar in Guyana is scheduled to be installed and tested in January 2009.
Mr. Tyrone Sutherland, Coordinating Director of the CMO, located in Port of Spain, said that “We completed the building at Brasso Venado on schedule in February, then after installing the radar itself, we went through several months of intensive testing – not without problems – before we certified that the radar is ready for full operations. This powerful new radar, built in Germany, provides continuous radar surveillance of all weather at various ranges to a distance of 400 kilometres (250 miles) in all directions.” He indicated that “Even during the test period, the Meteorological Service at Piarco has been using the information provided, although arrangements for its official hand-over to the Government of Trinidad and Tobago are still to be finalized.”
Mr. Glendell De Souza, Science and Technology Officer at the CMO, himself a former Senior Meteorologist with the Trinidad & Tobago Met. Service, said that “the new radars will enable weather forecasters to study and monitor weather systems as they develop, thereby allowing Meteorologists to provide more accurate and timely information of the type, intensity and location of severe weather, including approaching tropical storms and hurricanes. In fact, the Met. Office at Piarco was able to use the radar very effectively during the flooding events of November”.
According to Mr Sutherland, “The Government of Trinidad and Tobago provided the CMO with the land at Brasso Venado for the construction of the tower and the installation of the radar after a very extensive collaborative search by technical experts of the CMO and the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. Now that the whole system has been completed here in Trinidad, we will formally transfer the radar to the Government for operation by the Meteorological Service for the protection of the citizens of the nation and neighbouring Caribbean States.”
Mr De Souza further stated that “Once we have handed the radar over to the Government, it is expected that the Meteorological Service will make its data, along with the data from the others in the regional Network, available to the public, media, Government agencies, disaster preparedness agencies and other users in the nation and throughout the Caribbean via the Internet. In other words, the public and others will be able to “see” for themselves, approaching weather on the radars.”
This Caribbean Radar Project is one of the regional activities of the Caribbean Forum of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (CARIFORUM) with funding provided by the European Union. The CMO, as the Implementing Agency, provided a variety of engineering, communication and radar systems experts to the Project, which was designed to replace the old and obsolete weather radars installed by the CMO in the late sixties and early seventies. The new radars will be linked electronically with the radars of other nations to provide almost complete coverage of the Caribbean.