Meteorological professionals who participated in the 2nd WMO Information System 2.0 (WIS 2.0) workshop held in Trinidad and Tobago

The workshop which started on Monday ended today Friday. It is being organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in collaboration with the Caribbean Meteorological Organization (CMO) Headquarters.

The workshop according to the organisers is “synergistic with both the WMO and CMO HQ roles in supporting the activities of their members by strengthening weather data and information exchange, which in turn helps to protect the region’s population by enhancing accessibility to early warning information”

At the end of the week-long forum, participants are expected to be versed and better educated on improving the collection of and better able to make available more weather observation data in real-time, which are vital for processing and improving the prediction of weather to enable adequate and effective preparedness, adaptation and response to weather and water hazards.

Dr. Arlene Laing, Coordinating Director of the CMO Headquarters told the start of the workshop that, the event emanated out of a CMO HQ baseline survey last year among its Member States, which showed a compelling need to grow capacity for implementing the WIS 2.0 in the region.

According to her, this new technology will assist with providing up-to-date weather information and advancing the region’s NMHSs data exchange capability, saying that the workshop was very timely and necessary

Hassan Haddouch, WMO’s WIS 2.0 Manager, was also present at the workshop.

He provided a history of WIS 2.0 and indicated that the workshop will assist WMO Members with building capacity on WIS 2.0 and deploying the WIS 2.0 box, which he hoped participants will be able implement on return to their countries.

Meanwhile, the workshop aims to help CMO Member countries to implement WIS 2.0 in an operational environment and to be able to use WIS 2.0 in a Box as a data hub.

Participants got an opportunity to “access virtual machines from their laptops and learn how to install and configure the WIS 2.0 Box and how to use this Box to share weather data and information online from their manual and automatic weather stations”

When the participants return to the various countries, they are expected to be able to improve the collection and sharing of meterological data from their weather observation network in real time on the Web, using the WIS 2.0 Box interface.

“Once implemented, the Caribbean NMHSs will be among the first Members of the WMO to have WIS 2.0 Box up and running on virtual machines. WIS 2.0 is the framework for Earth Systems – meteorological, hydrological, climate and ocean – data sharing in the 21st century,” a statement to the media said

Saying that “it is based on the principle that no WMO Member should be left behind in relation to meteorological data sharing.