Rain Watchers Award goes to Bulacan school

MANILA, Philippines—It’s sweeter the second time around: San Miguel National High School improved on its second-place finish in 2010 to win this year’s grand prize in the Rain Watchers Awards.

The Bulacan public school bested 81 other schools in the second year of the annual rainfall monitoring competition conducted by the Typhoon Committee Foundation Inc. and the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa), in partnership with Smart Communications Inc.

Tabaco National High School in Albay came in second, and Monkayo National High School in Compostela Valley, last year’s grand prize winner, came in third.

The Rain Watchers Awards was launched in September 2009 to strengthen participation in Smart’s Project Rain Gauge by rewarding the efforts of partner-schools to regularly monitor rainfall in their areas.

Rain gauges

Under the project, students in public schools in flood-prone areas maintain rain gauges provided by Smart within their campuses. They are trained in monitoring and recording rainfall data, which they send to a website (www.projectraingauge.ph) hosted and maintained by Smart.

The winners each received a laptop and cash prizes of P25,000 for the champion, and P15,000 and P10,000 for the second- and third-placers.

Each team member also received a cell phone, a Smart Bro prepaid plug-it unit, a congressional medal, and a certificate of recognition during the awarding ceremony held at the Pagasa Science Garden in Quezon City.

The winners were recognized recently in plenary at the House of Representatives, and were treated to a field trip at the Manila Ocean Park. Smart also sponsored their attendance at the two-day Philippine Meteorological Society convention “Dots, Isobars and Meteograms: Understanding the Science of Meteorology.”