Early Warning
Currently, early warnings are undertaken by many relevant agencies such
as the Meteorological Services of the Department of Civil Aviation, Ministry of
Health, Department of Agriculture and Agrifood, Marine Department, Fisheries
Department, Department of Environmental and Recreation and many more.
These bodies or departments have put in place policies and strategic planning to
improve the management of disasters through effective early warning systems.
The Meteorological Services for instance is currently upgrading its weather
forecasting capabilities. It has recently installed an advanced and high resolution
Weather Radar and forecast integrated system which will further enhance Brunei
Darussalam’s capacity in monitoring and issuing severe weather warnings well
in advance. Furthermore, a Low‐Level Windshear Alert System is also expected
to be completed in April 2012. The 16 months project would allow the department
to detect windshears and micro‐bursts, localized columns of sinking air, which
can be hazardous to low‐lying aircraft taking off and landing at the Brunei
International Airport. Other projects in the pipelines also include a system to
detect air turbulences as high as 16 kilometer above ground known as the
System for Wind Profiling Echo Registering. The department also planned to
replace the climate database system, to update the effectiveness and capability in
collecting or archiving weather and climate forecast data for higher quality and
more reliable data, in accordance with the WMO’s standards.
The (University Brunei Darussalam)UBD/IBM Centre is currently working
an early warning system for floods that will increase warning times from the one
hour to 18 hours. By feeding LIDAR (Light Detecting and Ranging) data into their
state‐of‐the‐art IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, the Centre can come up with a
model that predicts which areas will experience flash flooding.