Barbados and the wider Caribbean can expect a run of intense heat, patchy hurricane activity and uneven rainfall through the latter part of the wet season, climatologists and meteorologists predicted on Friday.

In the July to September edition of the Caribbean Climate Outlook newsletter, lead regional climatologist with the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH), Dr Cedric Van Meerbeek, and climate change specialist with the UWI Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES), Dr Theodore Allen, report that these conditions will result from a strengthening of the El Niño weather system during the summer months of the Caribbean wet season, as well as global warming.

The experts caution that people should also experience increasingly intense humid heat into the peak of the heat season in September, culminating in recurrent heatwaves, especially in the far north of the region.