IN an effort to ensure that the country’s weather conditions are accurately recorded and monitored, the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), on Monday, installed an automatic weather station near the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Guyana’s Turkeyen campus.

The CARDI Day activity is an important development as it will make daily planning easier for members of the public, particularly farmers.

Following a simple ceremony, CARDI Executive Director Ansari Hosein, told the Guyana Chronicle that the facility is more than just a donation. According to him, it is an opportunity to partner with the university and the Guyana Hydrometeorological (Hydromet) Service.

He explained that the automatic weather station is equipped to measure humidity, rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, solar radiation, barometric pressure and UV radiation.

The aim of the weather station is to provide valuable data that will in turn benefit meteorologists, farmers, policymakers, students and researchers by allowing them to monitor weather conditions more accurately, he added.

Hosein noted that following discussions between CARDI and the faculty, it was agreed that this venture will provide useful information for the students and staff who are conducting research at the weather station.

He said that currently there is no locally available weather data to correlate with events and observations in the area. With the new automatic weather station, that gap will be filled, further enhancing the quality of the research.

The CARDI official pointed out that climate change is a major concern for the region.

“Today, one of the greatest challenges we in the region continue to experience is that of climate change. There is no denying that climate change is real and that it is impacting the Caribbean. The increasing frequency and intensity of hydrometeorological events such as droughts, hurricanes and floods have unfortunately led to the loss of hundreds of lives, caused severe infrastructural damage, resulted in the loss of crops and livestock, and caused human displacement,” he told this publication.

He further stated that a variation in climate change has been recorded in the past few years. He pointed out that this was evident in Guyana in 2021 when the country experienced a high level of flooding due to heavy rainfall.

With the new weather station installed, data collected over a period of time will help to predict and provide researchers with the necessary information so that they will be able to help the agricultural sector and farmers to better understand which crop is more resilient to flooding and which ones ought to be grown during dry weather.
Once this happens, farmers will be able to move away from the traditional four-season period that is experienced in Guyana and work on planting more throughout the year.

Hosein thanked the Government of Guyana for the excellent work being done to ensure that Guyana is leading by example when it comes to oil and gas, and more importantly, agriculture.

CARDI is a CARICOM institution which was established 48 years ago following the signing of an agreement in Georgetown, Guyana.