Fred Capello's Home Page

If you are interested in local (Curaçaoan) and international weather topics, read my pages!
Links to very informative sites are ahead!

My main hobbies are meteorology and watching professional American sports like Major League Baseball, NBA basketball and NFL (American) football on TV. Reading international news magazines like TIME and Newsweek is also one of my favorite pastimes. To stay healthy, you got to have a good sense of humor. That's why another of my favorite magazines is MAD.
My favorite kind of music? That's symphonic rock and there is no better band than Yes to perform this genre of great music.
Talking about music, one of the most popular pop and rock music radio stations in the island is Radio Dolfijn FM, a Dutch language radio station with a web site in the same language. It's also the favorite station of yours truly.
Finally my most practiced hobby in this list is, like for a still increasing amount of other people, surfing the Internet.

Meteorology

Since 1979, I have been a meteorologist at the Meteorological Service of the Netherlands Antilles & Aruba. My main job as a meteorologist is to inform pilots and other airline personnel about weather conditions on their flight routes and at their destinations. Issuing weather forecasts for the general public and mariners comes in second and third place respectively. Giving information about hurricanes and other tropical systems however is what I like to do most in my job. The hurricane season, which in the Atlantic basin lasts between June 1 and November 30, is the most exciting period as far as the weather is concerned. I followed a couple of courses about hurricanes and other tropical weather systems at the Tropical Prediction Center (TPC), formerly known as the National Hurricane Center and also at the University of Miami.
In addition to that, in the last week of September and all of October 1999, I had a special assignment at the TPC. My main task there was to discuss with colleagues in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America (over the telephone) whether or not, watches or warnings were needed when their countries were being threatened by tropical cyclones. Also, I had to give interviews to Spanish language media in the United States and the regions mentioned above, especially when tropical cyclones were active over the Atlantic Basin near populated areas.

Since my profession is also my hobby, I'm also a meteorologist and a weather observer when I'm off-duty. I have an official rain gauge at home which enables me measure how much rain has fallen in my neighborhood in a certain period. Along with me are several other volunteers in Curaçao and on the other islands of the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba (and elsewhere on Earth as well) who also do this kind of work. In the tropics most of the rain comes down in showers which tend to be very localized. Therefore, it's very important to have a dense network of rainfall stations to give a clear indication how unevenly the rainfall can sometimes be distributed over our tropical islands. Below I'll give you a link to my local climate page. There you can read and see how much (or little) rain was measured at my station in the Curaçaoan quarter of Van Engelen in the period between January 2003 and January 2009.

Want to see links to great satellite pictures covering the Caribbean Area, also the eastern U.S.A. and the whole Atlantic hurricane belt? How about other parts of the Earth beyond those areas? Go now to my Weather Satellites page!

Below is a picture of how Curaçao looks like on a clear day as seen from about 600 kilometers above. (The grey-white dot on the eastern (right) half of the island shows where Van Engelen is approximately located).

I'm not an astronomer but check my Astronomy Page anyway for details (including eye-witness reports and pictures) on the beautiful and unforgettable total solar eclipse we experienced a little more than ten years ago on February 26, 1998. The totality of it was visible in among others Curaçao, neighboring Aruba and Northwestern Venezuela. Tables with the times of sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset in Curaçao this year can also be found on or through links on this page.

Tune in regularly for frequent updates on my various pages!