Weather Radar Observations
Attribution:
provided by Environment and Climate Change Canada. Contains information licenced under the
Weather radar composites are a crucial part of the Canadian Mesonet Portal, offering a comprehensive, real-time view of precipitation patterns, storm intensity, and weather systems across Canada. Unlike in-situ observations, which provide localized data from specific ground-based stations, radar composites offer broader spatial coverage, allowing us to visualize weather systems as they evolve and move over time. This is particularly important in a country as vast and geographically diverse as Canada, where severe weather events like thunderstorms, snowstorms, and heavy rainfall can develop rapidly and affect large areas.
By integrating radar composites into the Canadian Mesonet Portal, the Northern Mesonet Project enhances our ability to detect and monitor these weather events in real-time. The radar data complements surface observations by filling in spatial gaps, providing insight into the vertical structure of storms, and identifying areas of heavy precipitation. Together with in-situ data, radar composites enable a more complete and dynamic understanding of Canada’s weather, improving forecasting capabilities and supporting decision-making for emergency services, researchers, and the public.
Data Description:
Description provided by the . Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
This mosaic is calculated over the North American domain with a horizontal spatial resolution of 1 km. This mosaic therefore includes all the Canadian and American radars available in the network and which can reach a maximum of 180 contributing radars. To better represent precipitation over the different seasons, this mosaic renders in mm/h to represent rain and in cm/h to represent snow. For the two precipitation types (rain and snow), we use two different mathematical relationships to convert the reflectivity by rainfall rates (mm/h rain cm/h for snow). This is a hybrid mosaic composed of different estimation precipitation products : PRECIP-ET product used only for C-Band radars (which are in the process of being replaced with S-Band radars) and DPQPE (Dual-Pol Quantitative Precipitation Estimation) for S-Band radars. For the US Nexrad radars, ECCC uses the most similar product from the US Meteorological Service (NOAA). This product displays radar reflectivity converted into precipitation rates, using the same formulas as the Canadian radars.
