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Cooperative Projects The CIMH is involved in a number of cooperative projects with various training and research institutions. The goals of these cooperative efforts are to enhance the training and research capability of the Institute and to upgrade the knowledge and skills of its staff through the use of new technologies. The CIMH is also involved in a number of development projects in the region, working with various funding agencies. These projects utilise the expertise of the staff in a wide range of fields. Below is a summary of some of the projects in which the CIMH is currently involved. Real-Time Flood Forecasting Project The Member States of the Caribbean Community are island states or continental countries with highly populated coastal plains lying below sea level. The Member States are subject to repeated flooding, some on an annual basis, with massive resultant loss in life and significant economic losses. This project proposes to develop a robust, reproducible, and transparent approach to flood forecasting that couples a physically based hydrological model capable of capturing changes in watershed characteristics to a numerical weather prediction model. The approach overcomes many of the deficiencies encountered in more traditional approaches to flood forecasting in small watershed where there is a short time lag between precipitation events and the onset of flood. Flood forecasting techniques currently implemented in some Caribbean territories often rely on (i) a series of precipitation measurements in the upland portions of watersheds to infer potential flooding downstream, and/or (ii) coarse precipitation forecasts from national meteorological services. In the former case, the time between the measured precipitation and the onset of flooding is often very short as most watersheds on Caribbean islands are small (10s of km2). In the latter case, coarse precipitation forecasts provide limited spatial and quantitative information to support a quantitative assessment of the potential for flooding. It is important to note that in the approaches mentioned little consideration is given to physical state of the watershed, which is a critical factor controlling flood development. This
project being proposed couples the physically based numerical
hydrological model HydroGeoSphere (developed at the University
of Waterloo)
which is capable of capturing changes in some watershed characteristics
to the numerical weather prediction model Weather Research and
Forecasting (WRF) model. The coupled modelling framework will be
applied to selected catchments in Project details and reporting are available below. Please contact Shawn Boyce at sboyce@cimh.edu.bb should you have any questions or queries. Project Details Files Project Summary Project Concepts Project Schedule Pilot Countries Press Release CARIWIN The Caribbean Water Initiative (CARIWIN) is a collaborative project led by McGill University's Brace Center for Water Resources Management, the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology & Hydrology (CIMH), and Caribbean partner Governments, to address the complex challenges of water management in the Caribbean and promote sustainable and equitable Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in the region. Launched in 2007, the 6-year project aims to achieve this by (i) strengthening the capacity of CIMH, as a regional institution, to provide training and capacity development in water resources management to CARICOM member states, and (ii) propagating capacity building initiatives in IWRM through CIMH at the national, local and community levels in the three partner countries - Jamaica, Grenada and Guyana. The CARIWIN project will increase the relevance and reach of CIMH while testing, developing and disseminating new tools and information products directed at decision-makers and policy-makers for application of IWRM in the Caribbean. Main achievements of CARIWIN to-date include:
For Further information please visit the project website at http://www.mcgill.ca/cariwin/, or contact Adrian Trotman at atrotman@cimh.edu.bb for any questions or queries Caribbean Water Monitor: Small island states, water resources and climate change This is a collaboration between the Institute of Earth Sciences-University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI-IST) and Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), funded by the Government of Switzerland. The Caribbean Water Monitor (CWM) is expected to be an essential tool in water resources management, and to assist in decision support for planning and managing water resources. The project builds on the existing Caribbean Drought and Precipitation Monitoring Network launched under the Caribbean Water Initiative (CARIWIN - http://www.mcgill.ca/cariwin/), to monitor and forecast rainfall for extremes (drought and excessive precipitation) with the goal of supporting water management. Four island states were initially identified for the CWM – Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and St. Kitts and Nevis – from which two would be chosen. The choice of states depended on (1) the availability and (2) the quality of the necessary data. Based on these criteria, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago were chosen for the CWM. It is expected that the project will produce the following outputs and results:
In an initial one day meeting in Barbados, staff from CIMH and SUPSI-IST discussed issues of the main working part. During the afternoon of that day, national agencies of Barbados with interest in water management were invited to discuss the project and its expected benefits. Later, in a one-week workshop in Switzerland, members of CIMH and SUPSI-IST further discussed issues of the main working step. This was also an occasion for further knowledge exchange between the two institutions and in particular to expose CIMH to the GIS and other facilities at SUPSI-IST. In the main working part of the project, the data of the two island states is collected and analyzed to:
An internet-based service is to be developed, where climate/rainfall indices are automatically calculated and displayed in a comprehensive manner. For this purpose routines are to be developed to prepare the necessary input data, calculate the corresponding indices and display the results in a suitable way. This approach was previously used by SUPSI-IST in St. Lucia, where Standardised Precipitation Indices (SPIs) were developed and displayed (http://www.droughthazard.org/). At two one-day workshops in Barbados and Trinidad, the project activities and outcomes as well as their usability are to be presented to an interested public of technical/scientific staff and decision takers and administrators. Guidance will be communicated on how these tools are to be used to develop water resources management frameworks. If this pre-project is successful, the project idea can be extended to cover the entire Caribbean as a full project, resulting in a Caribbean Water Monitor, an internet-based tool which gives a complete view on the current situation regarding water resources in the Caribbean. The Canadian Meteorological Centre This project with the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) is aimed at the promotion of technology transfer and at improving the knowledge and abilities of the Institute's staff in the development and implementation of NWP models, as well as the interpretation of the model output and its use and application to forecasting in the tropics. The project also provides an opportunity for CMC to get some feedback on the performance of their global model in the tropics. The CMC provides the CIMH with output data from its global model which is used in both research and training. The emphasis of the research is on the systems such as tropical waves and tropical cyclones. The RAMM Advanced Meteorological Satellite Demonstration and Interpretation System (RAMSDIS) is a PC-based unit developed by the Regional And Mesoscale Meteorological (RAMM) team at CIRA. The RAMSDIS program is aimed at providing the US National Weather Service’s (NWS’s) Forecast Offices with high quality, digital satellite data directly from NOAA’s NESDIS server. The program has been extended to include two WMO RMTC’s, the CIMH and the University of Costa Rica Department of Atmospheric Sciences (UCR). Both CIMH and UCR have been
equipped with workstations for use in
research. With assistance from the RAMM Team the CIMH has analysed a
number of case studies. One such study is the October 1996 floods in The CIMH is also currently using the digital satellite imagery to develop cloud climatologies for the region. It is expected that the CIMH will soon have direct access to the NESDIS server on an hourly or half-hourly basis via the Internet to obtain satellite data.
The Adaptation to Climate Change in the Caribbean (ACCC) project is funded by the Canadian Climate Change Development Fund (CCCDF) through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). This project is intended to maintain the momentum on climate change issues started under the now-ended Caribbean Planning for Adaptation to Climate Change (CPACC) project. One of the nine components of this project focuses on strengthening the technical capacity of national and regional institutions in response to gaps and needs identified in the first three years of the CPACC program. To this end the CIMH is benefiting through staff training and development aimed at strengthening its climate change capacity, among other things. Meanwhile the Institute is
providing technical assistance to the
project as it undertakes the rescue of hydrological data from several
of the countries in the SIDS Caribbean Project The Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Caribbean Project, a project funded by the Government of Finland, aims to provide tools for better planning for sustainable development in the Caribbean region, by strengthening the National Meteorological Services so that they are able to provide information needed for planning purposes at national and international levels, and to make the respective countries capable of fulfilling international commitments. There are six components in the project:
The CIMH will benefit from the activities in some of these components leading to both institutional strengthening and capacity building. At the same time the CIMH will contribute to the project by providing technical and other support and advice. The Institute has received some computers for use in the training programme and in the upgrading of its climatological database. A new telecommunications system will be provided and the technical laboratory for the calibration and maintenance of instruments is being refurbished and upgraded. The Institute is providing technical assistance and support in the implementation of the data rescue and climate database management components of the project. The CIMH is also assisting in the facilitation of the upgrade to the instrument laboratory. In addition, the CIMH is mounting special training courses, as well as hosting others, for the project. GECAFS The Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) is a new, interdisciplinary research project involving a wide range of social, physical and biological scientists, investigating the vulnerability of human food systems to, and interactions with, Global Environmental Change. It is sponsored by three major international research Programmes: the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and is being developed in collaboration with the CGIAR, FAO and WMO. The GECAFS goal is “To determine strategies to cope with the impacts of Global Environmental Change on food provision systems and to analyse the environmental and socioeconomic consequences of adaptation”. Regional research projects are now being developed in close collaboration with the local policy-making and scientific communities to ensure that research results will contribute directly to the information needs of the region’s policy formulation. One of these projects is being developed for the Caribbean region with emphasis on CARICOM countries. The CIMH is participating in the proposal writing team for GECAFS Caribbean Food systems project. |
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