What you can see on the Ragged Point cam
The camera looks east over the Atlantic from the clifftop: the sea, the edge of the cliffs on the right and, above all, the sky. It is a camera for clouds, sunrises and weather. In the morning the sun comes up straight out of the ocean in front of it; through the day the small, puffy clouds of the trade winds drift towards the island, and squalls show as dark curtains of rain on the horizon.
The Atlantic from the cloud observatory
From the clifftop of the Barbados Cloud Observatory, near Ragged Point, this camera looks east over the Atlantic: a broad sweep of sky and sea, with the edge of the cliffs on the right. The sun rises straight out of the ocean in front of it.
It is a still image, renewed every few minutes, made to watch clouds: the small cumulus of the trade winds, the squalls on the horizon and the light of the early morning over the sea.
A station for watching clouds
The camera belongs to the Barbados Cloud Observatory, set up on Deebles Point, next to Ragged Point, in 2010 by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, from Germany, with the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology. Its radars, lidars and cameras study the shallow clouds of the trade winds, which cover much of the tropical oceans and matter a great deal for understanding the climate. Because the air arrives here straight from the open ocean, it is one of the best places in the world to measure them.
When to watch Ragged Point
Barbados keeps Atlantic Standard Time all year, four hours behind UTC. Sunrise is the moment to watch, and the light is softest in the first hours of the morning. From roughly December to May the trade winds are steady and the skies dry; the rainy season, from June to November, brings more squalls and is also the hurricane season.
Around Ragged Point
The old Ragged Point lighthouse stands on the headland. Along the south-east coast lie the cliffs and pink sand of Crane Beach and the bays of St Philip, and up the east coast, Bathsheba and its giant rocks in the surf.
Getting to Ragged Point
The point is at the end of a country road in St Philip, a short drive from Grantley Adams International Airport. The cliffs are high and unfenced in places: keep back from the edge.
