A team of German engineers has arrived in T&T to conduct repairs on the Met Service’s Doppler Weather Radar.

The Radar has been non-operational since February 2020.

Works are expected to begin immediately and the TTMS says every effort will be made to expedite the process.

The engineers are from LEONARDO, the German Radar Manufacturing Company.

What is the Doppler Weather Radar?

103.1FM News reached out to the TTMS for more information on this piece of equipment.

The Doppler Weather Radar is one of the tools used to monitor and analyze weather conditions.

It provides capabilities of detecting developing thunderstorms and their movement, estimating heavy localized rainfall accumulation, rainfall intensity and strong winds, detecting tornadoes, tracking hurricanes and weather systems that come within 400 km of Trinidad and Tobago.

The X-band radar installed at the Tobago Met Office on May 13th 2022 provides redundancy for the TTMS

At the national level, the role of the radar is applicable to now-casting and short-range forecasts for severe weather, and includes improving the accuracy of severe local weather warnings.

The TTMS adds however that the radar’s absence does not prevent it from warning in advance, as its currently does, sometimes a day or 2 or 3 ahead, which is beyond the scale of the radar.

It says while the radar is quite important, it is one part of an integrated observing system that blends data from the weather radar and other instruments to produce a more complete picture of atmospheric conditions.