Sri Lanka has asked Japan to help establish a second Doppler weather radar system, this one in the Batticaloa–Pottuvil area on the east coast, Deputy Minister of Defence Aruna Jayasekara has said.
Discussions between the two governments are under way, the deputy minister said, but Japan has not yet indicated whether the system would be provided as grant aid, NewsFirst reported on Tuesday morning.
A first Doppler radar system is currently under construction at Puttalam, on the opposite, north-western side of the island.
Merrill Mendis, Director of the Forecasting Division at the Department of Meteorology, said Sri Lanka would be able to produce accurate weather forecasts once both systems are built — framing the eastern installation as the second half of a pair rather than a standalone addition.
Why a second site matters
Doppler radar measures the movement of rain and wind within a storm rather than simply detecting that precipitation is present, which lets forecasters track how severe weather is developing and where it is heading in near real time. Sri Lanka’s existing observation network leans heavily on ground stations and satellite data, which give considerably less warning of fast-developing local systems.
Radar coverage is limited by range and by terrain, and a single installation on the north-west coast cannot see deep into the weather approaching from the opposite direction. Systems that reach Sri Lanka from the Bay of Bengal — the source of the cyclones and low-pressure systems that drive the island’s most damaging rainfall events — arrive from the east and north-east, which is the sector a Batticaloa–Pottuvil radar would cover.
The request comes during an unusually disruptive spell of weather. The Meteorology Department has warned of more than 100mm of rain across parts of four provinces on Tuesday, following flash flooding that submerged much of Colombo on 6 November, and has been tracking a succession of Bay of Bengal disturbances through the month.
The Puttalam project
The Puttalam radar is Japanese grant-funded. This desk reported in July that the Defence Secretary inspected the site and was briefed on the implementation schedule: installation of the radar system was then scheduled to begin in January, with the whole project to be completed by the end of July 2027.
The Department of Meteorology’s Director General briefed that visit, and project engineers set out construction progress. Tuesday’s filing does not update the Puttalam timetable.
Not reported
The filing does not give a cost estimate for the eastern system, a timeline for a decision by Tokyo, or a target date for construction. It does not specify an exact site within the Batticaloa–Pottuvil area, and does not say which Japanese agency the request was routed through or at what level the discussions are being held. It also does not say whether this request is connected to, or a revival of, any earlier plan for a second radar on the east coast — a question the filing raises implicitly by describing the two systems as a set, but does not answer. This desk has not been able to establish that link from a datable current source and does not assert it here.
A note on sourcing
This report is single-source. The Daily Mirror and Hiru News rails were checked directly and carry nothing on the request, and a search across verified Sri Lankan newsrooms returned only older Doppler radar coverage — including material on the Puttalam project and on earlier radar procurement — none of it from within the current reporting window. Background on the Puttalam project above is drawn from this desk’s own July 2026 report, which is linked and dated.
