Two complementary views of the atmosphere: ground-truth data from our own/ KNMI's sensor network, and a full suite of model, satellite and forecast products from the world's leading meteorological organisations.
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba are special municipalities of the Netherlands, situated in the Caribbean Sea. Together they are referred to as the BES Islands or the Caribbean Netherlands. Each island has a distinct geography, climate and set of meteorological challenges — and MeteoA, together with KNMI, monitors them all.
A flat, arid island located 80 km north of Venezuela in the southern Caribbean. Bonaire has a semi-arid climate (Köppen BSh) with trade winds, negligible seasonal rainfall variation and one of the highest average sunshine durations in the Netherlands.
12.2°N · 12 km² · ~25,000 pop.A volcanic island in the northern Leeward Islands with a single prominent peak, The Quill (601 m). Its orography creates a marked rain shadow effect and strong localised wind acceleration, making hyperlocal monitoring essential for accurate data.
17.5°N · 21 km² · ~3,200 pop.The Netherlands' highest point (Mount Scenery, 887 m) on an island barely 13 km². Saba's steep terrain generates complex micro-meteorology: cloud formation at the summit while the harbour is sunny, wind speeds varying by a factor of three within a kilometre.
17.6°N · 13 km² · ~2,000 pop.Every reading in this dashboard comes directly from physical instruments installed in the field — anemometers, rain gauges, temperature and humidity sensors and complete weather stations. The BES island instruments are a current KNMI research project, and the KNMI AWS installations (Bonaire Airport, Sint Eustatius Airport and Saba Airport) are permanent meteorological observational systems. Data is collected every 10 minutes and published in near real-time. What you see here is what the atmosphere is actually doing at each station location at that moment, with no modelling or interpolation.
Open the full northern BES islands station dashboard.
Open the full Bonaire station dashboard.
High-resolution numerical weather prediction for the BES Islands, driven by the North American Mesoscale (NAM) Forecast System. Updated multiple times daily, this model provides a 72-hour outlook covering wind, temperature, precipitation, cloud cover and more at each island location.
Navigate between stations and variables to explore the full forecast product.
This dashboard is powered by the North American Mesoscale (NAM) Forecast System, operated by NOAA and archived by the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). NAM is a high-resolution operational weather model that runs four times daily, ingesting thousands of surface and upper-air observations to produce short-range forecasts across North America and the surrounding Caribbean region.
The model output displayed here uses the 3 km horizontal grid spacing nest, which resolves mesoscale features such as island-scale wind flow, local convection and orographic effects — detail that coarser global models cannot capture. Forecasts extend up to 72 hours ahead for Saba and Sint Eustatius, making this product well-suited for operational planning in agriculture, construction and marine activities across the BES islands.
Island meteorology differs fundamentally from continental weather systems. Small land masses interact intensely with the surrounding ocean, trade wind systems and convective precipitation. Global and regional models struggle to capture these effects at fine scales. On-site measurement networks are essential.
Mountains force moist trade winds upward, causing intense rainfall on windward slopes while leeward sides remain dry. On Saba and Sint Eustatius, rainfall can differ by a factor of three across a distance of 2 km. Only a station network captures this variability.
The Caribbean trade wind system (easterly, 4–8 m/s year-round) is generally stable, but orographic channelling, sea breeze interactions and tropical wave passages cause significant local variability that affects agriculture, aviation and marine operations.
Intense convective precipitation cells develop rapidly and pass within minutes. The 10-minute measurement cycle of the BES network captures onset timing and intensity that hourly or daily averages completely miss.
The ECMWF IFS operates on a 9 km grid; the NAM model nest on 3 km. Neither can resolve the micro-topography of Saba's 13 km² or the individual ridgelines of Sint Eustatius. Ground-truth from installed sensors is essential for model verification and correction.
The BES Islands monitoring network is part of a live KNMI research project. Permanent AWS installations at Bonaire Airport, Sint Eustatius Airport and Saba Airport serve as official meteorological observing systems, complemented by MeteoA's AioWS network across the islands.
Long-term continuous records from the BES Islands are scientifically valuable for detecting Caribbean climate trends — sea surface temperature warming, precipitation pattern shifts and extreme weather frequency — for the Dutch scientific community and global climate monitoring bodies.