Building Resilience Through Climate Adaptation Technologies (BReTCAT)

Resurgence has partnered with the Jamaica-based Caribbean Climate Innovation Center (CCIC) to help improve weather information services in Jamaica, particularly for communities and business sectors that are vulnerable to high impact weather.

The 30-month project is helping the Meteorological Service of Jamaica (MSJ) to engage with these stakeholders to co-design forecasts, severe weather warnings and related advice messages. These will be more relevant to their information needs and easier to access and use than MSJ’s current range of information outputs.

Stakeholders targeted include the inhabitants of informal settlements, farmers, fishermen, the tourism industry and the road transport sector.

The project will help MSJ to launch a weather app in Jamaica that has been localised and configured for local conditions. Nearly half the country’s 3.0 million population own a smartphone.

The weather app is designed to display location-based forecasts that are generated automatically by MSJ’s Finnish-designed SmartMet weather forecasting system. 

Nine other Caribbean national meteorological services also use SmartMet. If the Jamaica pilot proves successful, Resurgence aims to support the launch of this weather app in several other states in the region.

Team

BReTCAT is implemented by Resurgence (UK), Caribbean Climate Innovation Center (CCIC, Jamaica) in partnership with the Meteorological Service of Jamaica (MSJ).