21st century technology will soon improve the work of The Saint Lucia Met Service and the Water Resource Management Agency (WRMA). The development of a Hydromet Portal is an initiative of the Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project (DVRP).
The online platform allows users to collect, archive, visualize and share hydrometeorological data. This data can forecast the amount of rain and its effect on specific areas.
Information Systems Manager of The WRMA Luther Tyson, says the new system would add support to his organisation and to the Saint Lucia Meteorological Service.
“Met services and WRMA are at the top of the early warning system or information chain if you will because we are the data providers. We provide the information and the data upon which decisions are made. In that regard it is important that we are able to provide that information in a timely manner so the purpose of the system is to basically speed up the access to that information to our partners like NEMO who is basically responsible for the communication when it comes to declaring a disaster or instructing persons of the general public of what they should be doing,” Tyson explains.
Users of the system were treated to a 5-day training session towards the end of March. “This week we’ve had training with the developers of the system so there are two contracted firms. One from Italy, CIMA and the other one from The Netherlands, Deltares. Deltares is responsible for the back end which is the data base, that will drive the system and CIMA is responsible for the user interface, the front end if you will, the web portal itself which is what most people will be interacting with,” Tyson reveals.
The International Centre for Environmental Monitoring (CIMA Foundation) is a non-profit research organization. Deltares is a non-profit knowledge institute for water and the subsurface.
Hydrologist of CIMA, Dr. Alessandro Masoero explains the twofold objective of the Hydro met Portal.
“The first one is to allow and enable the two agencies, the weather resource management agency and the Met Services to work together to share the weather and water information in a single access point that is the Hydro met Portal and to perform their analysis forecast and assessment to this portal. Then the other objective of the hydromet portal is to share the information, the most important information with the general public,“ Masero notes.
Aside from platform development and training sessions, the project also includes the supply of necessary hardware.