New Systems to
Boost Disaster Alert
By Rebecca Kimitch
Tico Times Staff
rkimitch@ticotimes.net

Be it floods, earthquakes or hurricanes, international scientists are making ground in the effort to ensure Costa Rica and other nations are informed in advance of impending natural disasters.

Twenty-six regional leaders from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a body of the United Nations, began meeting here yesterday to determine how to create a Regional Climate Center to better anticipate future tsunamis, tropical storms and other natural disasters.

While the forum is focused on meteorological conditions, the development of an effective warning system can help in any kind of emergency situation that is forecasted, including earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, explained conference-attendee John Kelly, deputy undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Debate still looms large on the predictability of earthquakes, although the possibility of doing so received a boost recently with the findings of a study published in Nature magazine.

The study of a series of faults in the east Pacific Ocean found that small tremors occur before earthquakes along the sea-based faults and could be used to predict coming earthquakes of magnitude 5.4 or greater.

The predictions come less than a few hours beforehand.

As some scientists are wary of the capability of predicting earthquakes, project researcher Thomas Jordan explained that the study proves that in this part of the ocean, detection is possible, the daily La Nación reported.

Meteorological-based disasters remain much easier to predict, said

Arthur Dania, president of WMO's North and Central American region, which also includes the Caribbean, Venezuela and Columbia .

“At this point there is not a country in the region that needs to be surprised by a climatic event,” Dania said.

He said the region has one of the best hurricane-alert systems in the world.

This system, which emerged from regional cooperation between academics and government officials after hurricane Mitch, will serve as the basis of the new Regional Climate Center .

The center will be virtual and based primarily on Internet communication, rather than a “large concrete building staffed by hundreds of people,” explained Kelly, who is responsible for U.S. interactions with the WMO.

U.S. involvement will be focused on training meteorologists on atmosphere-evaluation techniques, he said.

One of the goals of this week's conference will be to sign a formal agreement regarding the center.

Another goal is to help develop a tsunami-warning system for the Caribbean, although the threat of a tsunami in the Caribbean is much less than it is in the Pacific, Kelly said.

An identification and warning system is already in place for tsunamis in the Pacific. However, pending funding from the United States, if provided, would make significant improvements, including increasing the number of seismic sensors in the ocean and extending the operation hours of the two tsunami observation centers (in Hawaii and Alaska) from eight hours a day to 24 hours a day.

Costa Rica receives real-time digital information from these and other meteorological centers in the United States , explained Paulo Manso, director of National Meteorological Institute of Costa Rica.

Institute officials make weather forecasts and emergency alerts based on this information and that collected by meteorological observers within Costa Rica .

Regional disaster prevention also received a boost last week when President Abel Pacheco and Panama President Martín Torrijos reached an agreement for both countries to work together in designing an alert system regarding flooding of the Sixaola River. Flooding on this river in January caused significant damage to homes, schools and farms on both sides of the border (TT, Jan. 14).

Manso stressed the need for an improved alert system, as global warming becomes a reality.

“With global warming, the frequency of national disasters could increase in this country. That is the primary issue the global community must face in this century,” he said.

Calling the potential impact of global warming on weather “apocalyptic,” Manso stressed the need to not only produce a better response to the effects of global warming, but also prevent it from happening further.

This big-picture approach to climate is one of the fundamentals of the WMO, and of this week's conference, Dania said.

The organization has three focuses: climate, weather and the quality and availability of water. It focuses on disaster prevention in terms of social and economic development, Dania said.

“There doesn't exist one area in our daily lives that is not affected by weather, climate or water, from agriculture to health,” he said.