Fred Capello's Home Page

Set your watches! This clock is a courtesy of the U.S. Naval Observatory and displays the (exact) current Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) for about 30 seconds. It can only be viewed with Firefox or Netscape. Click on Reload when the clock stops running to see the correct time again. It may skip occasionally a few seconds (while running). Local time in Curaçao or Atlantic Standard Time is four hours behind UTC or GMT while Eastern Standard (Winter) Time in the United States is five hours behind UTC. The displayed time is also one hour ahead of Central European (Winter) Time.

Hi there! My name is Alfredo Capello. My nickname is Fred. If you are a regular visitor of this page, skip the personal (maybe boring) information below and go straight to the reference to my other pages. On those pages, I'll give you information and links to interesting web sites on meteorology in general and the weather and climate in my Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao in particular. If you want to know the latest about active tropical cyclones, anywhere on Earth, click here. Additionally you'll find some information too about astronomy, including tables with rise and set times of both the sun and the moon in my island.

I was born on December 3, 1952 and have lived most of my life in the island of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. I actually live in the outskirts of the beautiful and historic capital of Curaçao and of the Netherlands Antilles called Willemstad. The quarter where I live is called Van Engelen (Dutch for "From Angels"). During most of the 1970's (1971 to 1978) I lived in the Netherlands in the centrally located city of Utrecht. I'm single and still enjoying every day of freedom!

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 weather forecaster at the Meteorological Service of the Netherlands Antilles & Aruba. My main job as a weather forecaster 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 weather forecaster 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 2004 and February 2010.

In the paragraphs below you will find links to my other, more specialized pages.

See my Local Climate Page for details about the weather (especially rainfall or lack of it) in Van Engelen Curaçao!
For the latest information about our local weather (including a forecast, synopsis and detailed view satellite picture), consult the MIO Weather Pages, brilliantly designed by CuraNet's/MIO's talented former Web masters, Michiel Ebberink and Marc de Winter. Two of the three pages are updated daily by yours truly.
is the name of my Internet Service Provider.

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).

Curaçao as seen from 600 kilometers

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season ended officially on November 30. The 2010 season will start officially on June 1. For the latest information about hurricanes and other tropical cyclones anywhere on Earth, take a look at my Tropical Cyclone Page. This page will be updated frequently, especially when there are active tropical cyclones present over any part of our planet.

There are currently, March 10/11, 2010, no active tropical cyclones anywhere on Earth.
Tropical cyclone 18S or Hubert on Thursday was weakening over eastern Madagascar.
Please jump straight to my non-Atlantic tropical cyclones section for more information.

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 almost twelve 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.

Fred Capello's Home Page

Tune in regularly for frequent updates on my various pages!