Pacific Desk

The Pacific International Training Desk (PITD; Pacific Desk) was established on the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) in 2001 by the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Weather Service (NWS) at the Weather Forecast Office (WFO) Honolulu. The Pacific Desk is one of NOAA's contributions to the World Meteorol... ogical Organization (WMO) Voluntary Cooperation Program (VCP). The Pacific Desk began by offering two-month training internships to visiting students from the Regional Association V (RA V) of the WMO in March 2001 and later expanded the training opportunity briefly to developing countries from WMO FA II nations in east and Southeast Asia, who were also members of the ESCAP/WMO Typhoon Committee. The vision of the Pacific Desk is to provide one-on-one basic weather forecast training with an emphasis on the tropics. The training program is focused on operational forecasting to enable the student to prepare and disseminate locally-produced meteorological, hydrologic and climate products for their home countries. The program focuses on participant learning outcomes such as improved ability to predict the onset of severe weather events, forecast daily local weather, and prepare and disseminate locally-produced meteorological, hydrologic, and climate products.Read More