As the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season draws near, the small low-lying Central American nation of Belize has brought one of hurricanes’ deadliest and most underrecognized hazards — storm surge — to the top of its regional climate adaptation agenda. This week, Belize is hosting a three-day high-level international workshop in Belize City, uniting leading meteorologists, national disaster response managers, and climate resilience experts from across the globe to refine storm surge forecasting and early warning capabilities for coastal communities throughout the Caribbean.
Storm surge, the rapid rise of seawater pushed inland by a hurricane’s strong winds, is responsible for roughly half of all hurricane-related fatalities in the Atlantic basin, and it poses an existential risk to low-lying coastal nations like Belize. The country has carried the collective memory of devastating storm surge damage for more than half a century, ever since Hurricane Hattie destroyed most of Belize City’s coastline in 1961, leaving hundreds dead and reshaping the nation’s urban development. Today, as climate change accelerates sea level rise and intensifies the strength of tropical cyclones, the threat of catastrophic storm surge has grown more urgent than ever.
The workshop, supported by long-term global partners including the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, builds on a 10-year regional capacity-building initiative to bring advanced storm surge modeling to vulnerable Caribbean nations. Belize was one of the first countries in the region to gain access to this cutting-edge modeling technology, which simulates potential storm surge impacts across the country’s varied coastline topography.
Ronald Gordon, Belize’s chief meteorologist, explained that the modeling framework does not focus on long-term climate projections; instead, it generates hundreds of synthetic hurricane scenarios that test how different storm intensities, forward speeds, and approach angles would interact with Belize’s unique coastal terrain to produce storm surges of varying heights. Over a decade of refinement, the models have become far faster, more geographically detailed, and more accessible to national forecasters across the Caribbean, thanks to U.S. government funding through the NHC.
Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the NHC, outlined the core goals of the week-long gathering: training local teams to identify at-risk communities before a storm forms, pre-position emergency resources, and issue accurate, timely warnings when a threat emerges. Technological advances have transformed the pace of capacity building, he noted: where it once took two to three years to deploy customized modeling systems for a single country, experts can now roll out the tools far more quickly, allowing the initiative to scale across the entire Caribbean region at an accelerated rate.
For Belize’s disaster leadership, the workshop also offers a critical opportunity to learn from recent real-world experience. Henry Charles Usher, Belize’s Minister of Disaster Risk Management, highlighted that delegates from Jamaica — which suffered a direct hit from Category 5 Hurricane Melissa just one year prior — are sharing on-the-ground lessons about storm surge impacts and response. “This gathering lets us draw from the hard-won experience of our neighbors,” Usher said. “Our goal is to use this advanced modeling and early warning technology to keep our communities informed, protect lives and property, and help our nation recover faster if a major storm strikes.”
Workshop organizers and participants stress that stronger scientific data and clearer, faster communication of warnings will be the deciding factor between life and death when the next major storm makes landfall. As climate change amplifies hurricane risk across the Caribbean, regional collaborative efforts like this initiative have become an essential tool for building climate resilience in the world’s most vulnerable coastal nations.