A Virtual Climate station is the result of threading together climate data from proximate current and historical stations to construct a long term threaded data set. For the purpose of identifying and tabulating daily extremes of record for temperature, precipitation and snowfall, the Meteorological Service of Canada has threaded or put together data from closely related stations to compile a long time series of data for about 750 locations in Canada to monitor for record-breaking weather. The length of the time series of virtual stations is often greater than 100 years. A Virtual Climate station is always named for an “Area” rather than a point, e.g. Winnipeg Area, to indicate that the data are drawn from that area (within a 20km radius from the urban center) rather than a single precise location.

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).

Anomalous weather resulting in Temperature and Precipitation extremes occurs almost every day somewhere in Canada. For the purpose of identifying and tabulating daily extremes of record for temperature, precipitation and snowfall, the Meteorological Service of Canada has threaded or put together data from closely related stations to compile a long time series of data for about 750 locations in Canada to monitor for record-breaking weather. Virtual Climate stations correspond with the city pages of weather.gc.ca. This data provides the daily extremes of record for Precipitation for each day of the year. Daily elements include: Greatest Precipitation.

Anomalous weather resulting in Temperature and Precipitation extremes occurs almost every day somewhere in Canada. For the purpose of identifying and tabulating daily extremes of record for temperature, precipitation and snowfall, the Meteorological Service of Canada has threaded or put together data from closely related stations to compile a long time series of data for about 750 locations in Canada to monitor for record-breaking weather. Virtual Climate stations correspond with the city pages of weather.gc.ca. This data provides the daily extremes of record for Temperature for each day of the year. Daily elements include: High Maximum, Low Maximum, High Minimum, Low Minimum.

Anomalous weather resulting in Temperature and Precipitation extremes occurs almost every day somewhere in Canada. For the purpose of identifying and tabulating daily extremes of record for temperature, precipitation and snowfall, the Meteorological Service of Canada has threaded or put together data from closely related stations to compile a long time series of data for about 750 locations in Canada to monitor for record-breaking weather. Virtual Climate stations correspond with the city pages of weather.gc.ca. This data provides the daily extremes of record for Snowfall for each day of the year. Daily elements include: Greatest Snowfall.

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.

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 from 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.

Hotspots represent active wildfires. Natural Resources Canada Canadian Wild Fire Information System identifies them by processing Infrared satellite images. This layer contains the hotspots that are selected to be used as input for the Regional Air Quality Deterministic Prediction System FireWork (RAQDPS-FW) to enable forecasting air quality while taking into account wildfire emissions. Geographical coverage is Canada and the United States. The products are presented as historical annual compilations which highlight long-term trends in cumulative effects on the environment.

The Coastal Ice Ocean Prediction System (CIOPS) provides a 48 hour ocean and ice forecast over different domains (East, West, Salish Sea) four times a day at 1/36° resolution. A pseudo-analysis component is forced at the ocean boundaries by the Regional Ice Ocean Prediction System (RIOPS) forecasts and spectrally nudged to the RIOPS solution in the deep ocean. Fields from the pseudo-analysis are used to initialize the 00Z forecast, whilst the 06, 12 and 18Z forecasts use a restart files saved at hour 6 from the previous forecast. The atmospheric fluxes for both the pseudo-analysis and forecast components are provided by the High Resolution Deterministic Prediction System (HRDPS) blended both spatially and temporally with either the Global Deterministic Prediction System (GDPS) (for CIOPS-East) or an uncoupled component of the Global Deterministic Prediction System (GDPS) at 10km horizontal resolution (for CIOPS-West) for areas not covered by the HRDPS.

Daily 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. Only a subset of the total stations is shown due to size limitations. The criteria for station selection are listed as below. The priorities for inclusion are as follows: (1) Station is currently operational, (2) Stations with long periods of record, (3) Stations that are co-located with the categories above and supplement the period of record.