A key limitation of Global Climate Models (GCMs) is the fairly coarse horizontal resolution of its outputs. For the practical planning of local issues such as water resources, watershed and marine coastal management, countries require information on a much more local scale than GCMs are able to provide. Regional models provide one solution to this problem. Through collaboration with the United Kingdom Meteorological Service Hadley Centre for the past ten (10) years, the GCM 300 km resolution has been downscaled to 50 km and 25 km for the entire region. Higher resolutions of 10 km and 3 km are currently being pursued. This effort is being coordinated by the Centre with researchers at the Cuban Institute of Meteorology (INSMET), the Climate Change Studies Group at UWI, Mona, Jamaica, the Computer Studies Group at UWI CERMES at Cave Hill, Barbados, and the University of Suriname. The Centre has provided hardware and software to the network members and provided support for training and staff exchange under the umbrella of this project.

The Figure shows the Centre’s link to the other three Centres and its upgraded computing system