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The 2017 hurricane season starts tomorrow, and if you’re getting a shiver of anxiety just thinking about it - don't worry, you're not alone.  After Hurricane Earl mashed up Central Belize last year, everyone is hoping for the best but bring for the worst.  

The hurricane season officially starts tomorrow, meaning that if you aren’t already prepared to weather a storm, you should start. Today the forecasters at the National Meteorological Service held a press conference to announce their predictions to the storms we’ll be seeing this year.

Catherine Cumberbatch - Chief Meteorological Officer, NMS
"They are going for 14 named storms and of these 14 named storms 7 are expected to become hurricanes and 3 of the 14 named storms they are projecting to become stronger or major hurricane- that is category 3 and above on the Saffir-simpson scale."

The 2017 forecast is higher than the average of 12 named storms, 4 hurricanes and 2 categories 3’s.  Cumberbatch highlighted some of the factors considered when making the predictions.

Catherine Cumberbatch 
"One was the enso phenomenon in the central pacific, whether we will have an El Niño effect or not, and the warmness of the North Atlantic Ocean was two key factors that came into producing this forecast."

And with an above average year coming up, the weather experts at the Met Office told us just how prepared we need to be.

Derrick Rudon - Deputy Chief Meteorological Officer, NMS
"Now there is no correlation between a high activity season and one making land fall in Belize. So you could have 20 storms one year and you could have 1 storm and that storm affect us. So the thing is, be prepared every year. Be prepared as if a storm I going to hit you. You should know where you are going and know what you are gonna do in the event of a hurricane or a tropical storm."

Now that you know that we’ll likely be seeing 14 named storms in the region, you may be wondering how you’ll be to keep track of the changing weather and potentially dangerous storms. Well, apart from watching the weather report on the news every night, you’ll be able to get live weather updates on the Met Office’s new website starting tomorrow morning.

Dwayne Scott - Electronic Technician 
"We have three systems running together to give you this information. We developed a brand new Web application for the forecasters to update the website. Previously they would interact with the website and type directly on the back-end of the website to update it. Now there is an application that we have developed in house specifically for that, so they don't interact with the website at all they just type in that and push it to the site. We have our database that is constantly ingesting information and pushing that data to the website and of course there is the content management aspect of the website itself. So those three things are working together to give you what you see here."

The Met Office stresses that seeing more storms than usual does not mean that more will hit Belize.  But, still, everyone should be properly prepared.