CTIC hosted the inaugural Regional PTWC New Enhanced Products Training Workshop for ICG CARIBE EWS Small Island Developing States 7 – 10 December, 2015 in Bridgetown, Barbados. This workshop was facilitated under the UNESCO–IOC/NOAA International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC) Training Programme International (ITP-INTL), and was convened with the financial and logistical support of UNESCO/IOC and USAID/OFDA through UCAR. Facilitation was also provided by the PTWC, CTWP and the Coastal Zone Management Unit (CZMU), Barbados.
The changeover to PTWC’s new enhanced forecast products for the Caribbean and adjacent regions, was approved by ICG/CARIBE-EWS VIII (2013), from October 26, 2015 – February 29, 2016 the enhanced products were being issued in parallel with the original products. The changeover to solely the new products took place on 1 March 2016. Against this backdrop, the four-day training workshop was convened to enable participants to support Member States in effectively receiving and analysing the PTWC’s enhanced tsunami forecast products for the Caribbean and its adjacent regions in order to take appropriate response actions. The workshop covered tsunami warning operations and the use of the PTWC Enhanced Products for tsunami threat decision-making, with specific attention on the tsunami warning chain and SOPs.
The training mainly targeted representatives from small island developing states and invitations were dispatched to Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Curacao, Dominica, France, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Sint Maarten, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and the United Kingdom. This workshop was attended by forty (40) participants mainly from the Tsunami Warning Focal Points (TWFP), Tsunami National Contacts (TNC), Emergency Management and first responder agencies. Representatives from partner organisations - Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), CIMH, CTWP, and the Puerto Rico Seismic Network (PRSN) also participated.