Project Rain Gauge Follow Up: Hazard Monitoring Workshop

To gather feedbacks and learning experiences from their rainfall monitoring activities in the past 3 months, teachers from 16 Smart Schools Program (SSP) partner schools attended the Hazard Monitoring Workshop held last November 19-20 at the Ateneo Manila Observatory and the PHIVOLCS office in Quezon City.

The Hazard Monitoring Workshop, a follow-up of the Rainfall Monitoring Workshop, is one of the activities under Project Rain Gauge, a joint initiative of Smart Communications, Inc. (SMART) and Manila Observatory’s KLIMA Climate Change Center, in cooperation with the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) and the Department of Education. Project Rain Gauge aims to create a network of ground stations across the country via Smart Schools to provide supplementary data on local rainfall measurement in specific areas. The first phase of Project Rain Gauge targets to train teachers from17 SSP schools located in disaster-prone areas.

Facilitated by trainors from Klima, PAGASA, and PHIVOLCS, the teachers were re-trained on reading, recording & reporting rainfall data using the standard rain gauge and were also commissioned to train other Smart-endorsed schools on rainfall monitoring. The teachers agreed to partner with SMART in the scaling up of the project by training other SMART-endorsed schools in their area.

By engaging more SSP partners in the future, the rainfall data recorded by the schools will be very valuable in determining fine-scale rainfall patterns necessary to describe local climate, and weather reporting and forecasting in local communities will be more accurate.

(Published 26 November 2007, Smart Schools Program)

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