You have entered the website of the Water and Environmental Research Institute of the Western Pacific (WERI) at the University of Guam. We are currently six faculty and five staff and our mission is to seek solutions through research, teaching and outreach programs, to issues and problems associated with the location, production, distribution and management of freshwater resources in Guam, the CNMI and the FSM.
Since the early 1950s, there has been considerable interest in the rainfall on Guam, especially by the US military and the US Geological Survey (USGS). Since 1950, over 60 government-sponsored rain gauge sites have operated on Guam. Unfortunately, the length of record of most of the sites is short, in many cases incomplete, and in some cases unreliable.
The few rainfall distribution studies for Guam have been based on limited data. As a result, the rainfall distribution patterns have been greatly oversimplified or incorrectly analyzed, and the actual rainfall gradients have been largely ignored. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the available data, then to use the acceptable data to build a 50-year rainfall database for selected sites on Guam. The resulting database provides a long-term rainfall climatology and an annual rainfall distribution map for the island.
