The Tribune

A STATE-of-the-art weather station has been added to further protect residents and staff at Atlantis, Paradise Island, in the event of a hurricane this summer.

Installed late last year as an upgrade to former apparatus - which mostly monitored rain and wind – the station will additionally collect data on lightning, barometric pressure, temperature, humidity and solar radiation among other things.

Costing around $40,000 and located at the PITDA building at the eastern end of the island, the enhanced weather station, supplied by a Finnish company, brings the equipment up to international standards.

“This new weather station by Vaisala is the same equipment used by Met Offices around the world,” Kevan Dean, Director of Emergency Preparedness at the resort, said. “We are actually on the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) site as one of several points for The Bahamas.

“With it, we can collect temperature data, relative humidity data, precipitation and it comes with a tipping bucket to measure rain amounts.

“There is a lightning detection system where we can now detect lightning from five, ten, 15 miles out ... It runs several different software programmes and has already proven itself very beneficial to our cause where Marine Water Park Operations are concerned as well as out at the golf course, particularly for the hosting of the LPGA tournament since we were able to get information like wind direction and such in real time.”

Mr Dean said the only challenges experienced so far have to do with persons assigned to review and collect the data need to get used to the new format.

The new weather station is a collaborative effort with installation assistance provided by the Bahamas Met Office, Commonwealth Electric and Atlantis’ IT Department and its sub-contractors. The equipment was supplied by the Finland-based Vaisala Inc and the Bahamas MET Office has agreed to maintain the hardware side of the system.

According to Mr Dean, it took a little less than a week to “get the system alive and online”, at a cost of roughly $40,000.

“And we can still build on this. There’s a lot more radars that we can actually put on this system if we needed to or wanted to, fairly simply,” he added.

Mr Dean said preparations at Atlantis to prevent at best and minimise at the very least any impact of any occurrence of a natural disaster this summer were tracking well.

“Overall we’re looking pretty good,” Mr Dean said.

“We typically stay in a state of readiness for any type of natural disaster threat and so

we are on a good pace for this season.

“Our direct preparations for the 2014 season began early in the year where we would have reviewed and refreshed plans for shelter operations and management and such, we’ve done our traditional sweeps of the property looking at drains, fuel levels, etc. “We’ve had a look at all the different pieces of equipment, particularly the generators, to ensure they are in good working order.

“We’ve already met with individual departments within the resort and we’ve begun our collective meetings to bring everyone together, our stocking levels have been reviewed and we’ve supplemented where necessary as far as our plywood, sandbags, batteries and things like that so we can take care of the physical aspect of things. And our newly installed weather station allows us to monitor the weather in real time, so I’m pretty pleased.”