What is the Canadian Mesonet Portal?
is an central repository and access point for publicly available surface weather observations across Canada. This includes specialized high-density networks installed and maintained by NMP for the dual purpose of evaluating new techniques and technologies as well as capturing weather events in high time resolution in underserviced areas prone to severe convective storms.
Accurate and timely surface weather data is essential for understanding severe convective storms, especially in regions with complex and dynamic climates like Canada. In-situ weather observations — those collected directly at the source (the ground) — provide critical real-time information that remote sensing tools like satellites and radars can not always capture. These observations allow us to measure temperature, precipitation, wind speed, humidity, and other meteorological variables at the earth's surface, improving our ability to detect severe convective storms.
In addition to in-situ observations, the also incorporates a range of other data sources. Currently this includes weather radar observations, satellite imagery, lightning strike observations, weather alerts, and thunderstorm outlooks. Each source plays a unique role in building a more complete picture of Canada's complex weather patterns. Satellite data allows us to track large-scale atmospheric processes, weather radar provides insight into precipitation and storm development, while lightning strike observations add critical information for severe weather detection.
Currently the Canadian Mesonet Portal is in a work-in-progress. Please be patient with us as we continue to build out new analysis tools, introduce more networks into the mesonet, and squash any software bugs!
Features:
- Plotting of surface station weather data from over 2,600 stations in a manner consistent with guidelines recommended by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). This includes NMP networks as well as 28 open data partner networks.
- Organization of meteorological variables into consistent categories. This helps prevent confusion across the differing networks which may call certain parameters by slightly different names.
- Filtering tools, including filtering by network, weather data, and recency.
- Ability to graph multiple variables simultaneously and analyze weather data for custom periods of time.
- Preliminary colourization of stations to show heat map of meteorological variables.
- Mutliple overlay options including weather radar, GOES-East satellite, lightning density, weather alerts, and thunderstorm outlooks.
- Algorithms to detect malfunctioning weather stations along with ability to hide those stations.
Coming Soon:
- Automated social media alerts when surface weather stations meet Environment Canada & Climate Change's criteria for public weather alerts.
- Interpolation of weather data in between stations.
- Historical data viewer.
- Exporting of weather data to CSV as well as exporting the current map view as a JPEG.
- Additional overlay options including surface fronts / boundaries, and the Maximum Estimated Size of Hail (MESH) product from the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
- Adding more partner networks. (Current upcoming partner networks include the Manitoba Agriculture Mesonet and BC Hydro.)
