Climate Exchange

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weather, climate, physical environment and socioeconomic data to

provide critical information on hazard, vulnerability, exposure and

risk to decision makers. The platform address several aspects of the

GFCS: (i) it provides an online environment in which producers of

weather and climate information can interact in real time with users

of the information and (ii) because the platform contains information

which scales from regional to local as well as across multiple timescales

it readily supports the delivery of a range scalable products and services.

Because of its online nature, the platform has provided an effective and

efficient approach for the sharing of human resources to support deci-

sion-making between countries and institutions. For example, during

the 2011 and 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Seasons, the platform was used

to support online discussions or possible impact scenarios between

National Disaster Management Offices, National Meteorological and

Hydrological Services, CIMH, the CIMA Foundation in Italy and the

Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency among others. The

project has also provided extensive training for participants in areas

such as GIS and remote sensing. The project is also in the process of

developing cheap low cost rain gauge loggers with the software and

hardware schematics being made publicly available.

An important requirement of the GFCS is the ingestion of global data

by regional centres to produce products and services for national services

and entities. The GFCS also requires that regional centres acquire data

from national entities and make it available to global product produc-

ing and archiving centres. Component 1 of the ERC project supports

this objective in that 14 automatic weather stations were installed in the

ten participating eastern Caribbean states. While all of these stations

have not been installed at this time, those that are transmit weather and

hydro-meteorological data in near real time to the platform as part of

the sub-regional early warning monitoring programme. Plans are under-

way to archive this data into the recently upgraded climate

database at CIMH prior to making it available to national,

regional and international users. In this way, the project is

filling important national and regional climate data gaps.

From 2008 to 2012, JICA implemented the CADM

Phase 2 project in Belize, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Guyana

and Dominica. The project included (i) the establish-

ment of early warning real-time monitoring networks

consisting of rainfall measurement stations and stream

level gauges in critical watershed on participating coun-

tries and (ii) the development of flood hazard maps for

selected watersheds in participating countries. The

early warning network was established with message

passing occurring via either cellular networks or other

wireless methods. As part of the sustainable plan for

the project, real-time data from the observing network

along with flood hazards maps are being integrated into

the Dewetra platform. The data collected will be made

available to the global production and archiving centres.

The GFCS represents an important achievement of the

WMOand its global partners that has the ability to transform

the generation and application of climate services to reduce

losses fromweather and climate disasters in the Caribbean.

Recognizing the full benefits will require a concerted effort

by the range of stakeholders in the region to integrate

resources to develop common platforms that support the

sharing of data, information and human resources in near

real time. Efforts are underway to demonstrate the value of

such an approach, however, it is recognized that while this

transformation will be slow, it is essential.

Elements of exposure on Barbados as visualized through the Dewetra platform

Image: CIMH