<i>Two lakh lost to natural disasters since 1980</i>
In a bid to provide accurate and specific warnings in local dialect about potential natural disasters, the country's meteorological department intends to automate the current manual warning system.
The manual numeric approach, which is used to predict natural calamities like cyclone, flood, flashflood, rainfall and depression manually for a vast area, is obscure to common people.
Meteorologists, at a workshop in the city yesterday, said that they were working with the stakeholders mainly in the coastal areas to develop easy communicable warning systems that would reduce mortality and prevent loss of properties.
People exposed to potential areas of natural disaster would be warned in their local dialect of any incident through the Short Message Service (SMS) of mobile connections, so that they can move to a safer place.
Almost 2 lakh people were killed and 32.34 crore people were affected in 234 natural disasters in the last 30 years, said Dr Linda Anderson Berry, manager of Weather and Ocean Services Policy Branch of Bureau of Meteorology at Australia, in her presentation at the workshop.
Bangladesh Meteorology Department (BMD) and World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) jointly organised the four-day long workshop at the BMD auditorium for stakeholders to gather knowledge and experience in finalising the draft of a four-year long project on 'Coastal Inundation Forecasting Demonstration Project'.
The speakers underscored the need for converting the scientific data in colloquial language to make the success even better.
The project aims to overcome the existing limitations of weather forecasting, said BMD Meteorologist Abdul Mannan.
Under the project, automatic weather stations will be set up across the country to collect accurate weather data, which will be incorporated in numerical models to predict the probable hits and magnitudes in a particular area, he said.
As a result, people would be able to take preparations and subsequent loss would be reduced, he added.
Chief of Climate Data and Analysis Section of Canada Val Swail and WMO scientific officer Dr Boram Lee also addressed the programme, which was chaired by BMD Director Arjumand Habib.
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