Soil Saturation Increasing with TS Sara Rains

All this rain has significantly increased soil moisture levels. However, Chief Hydrologist Tenielle Hendy reassures us that there is no imminent flash flood threat now. Here’s what she shared with reporters this afternoon.

 

Tenielle Hendy, Chief Hydrologist, N.H.S

“As you can see the soil moisture is very high and saturated in this central region of the country. We do not have any imminent flashflood threats in any of our model time series, which is one three and six hours, same is for the persistent time flood threat for our flash flood guidance. Of note we are seeing positive indication for landslides in the country. You can see it here for Honduras. But, for Belize we just have some areas in the north that we will need to monitor for our landslides.”

 

Paul Lopez

“I think yesterday we received information that there weren’t going to be any indi9cation of flash flood, yet what we saw in San Ignacio, in the Bullet Tree Area were flash floods.”

 

Tenielle Hendy

“What happened is that the platform we are running is that it has size limitation, not only for Belize but for the entire Central American region. And the issue is that some of these mini water shed sizes are computationally too large for these systems to address and we do find other ways of indicating whether that system will be flooded. Which is why we had put out the flood warning for the Mopan River and the Macal, including the Belize River system in this area. We don’t want the public to misunderstand that flood warnings are just for riverine flooding or rainfall associated flooding. Flooding is flooding. It doesn’t matter what area or component of flooding we are speaking about. So flash flooding is included in that flood warning.”