Current conditions and forecasts for selected Canadian cities. Raw XML data are used to generate each city page on the Environment Canada web site https://www.weather.gc.ca/.

The Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) is a scale designed to help quantify the quality of the air in a certain region on a scale from 1 to 10. When the amount of air pollution is very high, the number is reported as 10+. It also includes a category that describes the health risk associated with the index reading (e.g. Low, Moderate, High, or Very High Health Risk). The AQHI is calculated based on the relative risks of a combination of common air pollutants that are known to harm human health, including ground-level ozone, particulate matter, and nitrogen dioxide. The AQHI formulation captures only the short term or acute health risk (exposure of hour or days at a maximum). The formulation of the AQHI may change over time to reflect new understanding associated with air pollution health effects. The AQHI is calculated from data observed in real time, without being verified (quality control).

The Operational Hydrodynamic Prediction System (OHPS) is a 2D hydrodynamic prediction system for the St. Lawrence River and fluvial estuary. It helps to better understand flows impacting the St. Lawrence ecosystem and serves as a decision-making tool for the integrated management of the St-Lawrence. Three components are integrated in OHPS system. The first one "steadysol" conducts daily steady-state flow analyses, 4 times per day at 00Z, 06Z, 12Z and 18Z, respectively, over a simulation domain extending from Montreal to Trois-Rivières. The second and third components, i.e. "analysis" and "forecast", provide continuous analyses and 48-hrs forecasts, respectively, for unsteady flows over an extended St. Lawrence domain of which the upstream boundaries locate in Carillon and Beauharnois while the downstream tidal boundary is near Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive, respectively, 4 times a day at 00Z, 06Z, 12Z and 18Z. The system provides high-resolution outcomes for various parameters such as water levels, depth-averaged velocities and derived attributes, over the simulated domains. The products are available in the NetCDF format, which provides datasets. The published datasets of "steadysol" is over an irregular triangulated mesh, while the datasets of "analysis" and "forecast" are over a Polar Stereographic grid.

Climate observations are derived from two sources of data. The first are Daily Climate Stations producing one or two observations per day of temperature, precipitation. The second are hourly stations that typically produce more weather elements e.g. wind or snow on ground.

The Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) is a scale designed to help quantify the quality of the air in a certain region on a scale from 1 to 10. When the amount of air pollution is very high, the number is reported as 10+. It also includes a category that describes the health risk associated with the index reading (e.g. Low, Moderate, High, or Very High Health Risk). The AQHI is calculated based on the relative risks of a combination of common air pollutants that are known to harm human health, including ground-level ozone, particulate matter, and nitrogen dioxide. The AQHI formulation captures only the short term or acute health risk (exposure of hour or days at a maximum). The formulation of the AQHI may change over time to reflect new understanding associated with air pollution health effects. The AQHI is calculated from data observed in real time, without being verified (quality control).

The Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN) provides lightning monitoring across most of Canada. The data distributed here represents a spatio-temporal aggregation of the observations of this network available with an accuracy of a few hundred meters. More precisely, every 10 minutes, the reported observations are processed in the following way: The location of observed lightning (cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud) in the last 10 minutes is extracted. Using a regular horizontal grid of about 2.5km by 2.5km, the number of observed lightning flashes within each grid cell is calculated. These grid data are normalized by the exact area of each cell (in km2) and by the accumulation period (10min) to obtain an observed flash density expressed in km-2 and min-1. A mask is applied to remove data located more than 250km from Canadian land or sea borders.

The Regional Deterministic Precipitation Analysis (RDPA) produces a best estimate of precipitation amounts that occurred over a period of 6 hours. The estimate integrates data from in situ precipitation gauge measurements, weather radar, satellite imagery and numerical weather prediction models. Geographic coverage is North America (Canada, United States and Mexico). Data is available at a horizontal resolution of 10 km. The 6 hour analysis is produced 4 times a day and is valid at 00, 06, 12 and 18 UTC. A preliminary analysis is available approximately 1 hour after the end of the accumulation period and a final one is generated 7 hours later in order to assimilate more gauge data.

The Global Deterministic storm Surge Prediction System (GDSPS) produces water level forecasts using a modified version of the NEMO ocean model (Wang et al. 2021, 2022, 2023). It provides 240 hours forecasts twice per day on a 1/12° resolution grid (3-9 km). The model is forced by the 10 meters winds, sea level pressure, ice concentration, ice velocity and surface currents from the Global Deterministic Prediction System (GDPS). The three dimensionnal ocean temperature and salinity fields of the model are nudged to values provided by the Global Ice-Ocean Prediction System (GIOPS) and the GDPS. During the post-processing phase, storm surge elevation (ETAS) is derived from total water level (SSH) by harmonic analysis using t_tide (Foreman et al. 2009).

Regional Deterministic Air Quality Analysis (RDAQA) is an objective analysis of surface pollutants that combines numerical forecasts from the Regional Air Quality Deterministic Prediction System (RAQDPS) with hourly observations from various monitoring networks in North America, including the Canadian measurement networks operated by the provinces, territories and certain cities, as well as the various American networks in the context of the AIRNow program administered by US/EPA (US Environmental Protection Agency). RDAQA analysis provides the best description of current air quality conditions, and is used to inform the public, meteorologists in the various Environment and Climate Change Canada forecasting offices, Health Canada and other users about the distribution of air pollutants near the ground, and the performance of forecasting models. Each hour, a preliminary product is available approximately one hour after the observation measurement time, while final and Firework products are available approximately two hours after the measurement time. The preliminary and final products contain analysis of the chemical constituents O3, SO2, NO, NO2, PM2.5 (fine particles with diameters of 2.5 micrometers or less) and PM10 (coarse particles with diameters of 10 micrometers or less), while the Firework product contains analysis of PM2.5 and PM10.

The Regional Deterministic Precipitation Analysis (RDPA) produces a best estimate of precipitation amounts that occurred over a period of 24 hours. The estimate integrates data from in situ precipitation gauge measurements, weather radar, satellite imagery and numerical weather prediction models. Geographic coverage is North America (Canada, United States and Mexico). Data is available at a horizontal resolution of 10 km. The 24 hour analysis is produced twice a day and is valid at 06 and 12 UTC. A preliminary analysis is available approximately 1 hour after the end of the accumulation period and a final one is generated 7 hours later in order to assimilate more gauge data.