We've all heard the gloom and doom outlook for climate change globally but what does it mean for Belize, Central America, or the Caribbean? Will our climate change? The truth is that right now nobody knows because all the models on climate change look at the bigger picture, which offer no direct information on impact to smaller countries like Belize. But this week, the CARICOM Climate Change Center based in Belize is looking at a new model for tracking climate change. It's called the "Precis" model. David Hassel from the Hadley Center in England is this week teaching Caribbean meteorologists how to predict climate change locally using the model developed in England.
David Hassel, Hadley Center
"When we bring the models to regions such as the Central American and Caribbean region we give the model to be runs specifically for the region with very fine high resolution and then we see the actual impacts of changing climates so we what are the actual impacts of global warming, how will that affect crops yields or flood risks. These are the things that really count to a human and natural level and that can be ascertained within each particular region of the world, in this case Central America and the Caribbean which hopefully will help the adaptation and planning for what goes on in the future."
Dr. Kenrick Leslie, Exec. Dir. - CCCCC
"What we need to do right now, and we have done it, as they have mentioned earlier, on global scale the resolution is about three hundred kilometers and when you think about it, most of the islands in the Caribbean's dimensions are under three hundred. So what we have done is we have gone from the global to the regional where we have resolutions of 25 kilometers and 50 kilometers and we can introduce into the model our local topography, our local vegetation, and so we can get much more realistic outputs that will be used as inputs into the impact studies for agriculture, watershed management, our ecological systems, storm surge, and so on."
And if you are wondering what's the outlook for the region according to the Hadley model, that will be revealed tomorrow. Belize is being represented at the meeting by forecasters Ann Gordon and Dennis Gonguez.
