In Canada, reliable weather and climate observations, already sparse, are dwindling further because of inadequate technology and cuts in the budget for weather stations.
Brent Nakashook, an Inuit who lives in Cambridge Bay in the Canadian Arctic, doesn’t particularly trust the local weather reports. Several times, he has called off weekend trips to fish for char or hunt musk ox after seeing storms predicted—only to find the Sun shining. “You’ve just shot your whole weekend based on the forecast,” he says.
The overall number of weather stations in Canada has fallen by half since the 1980s, to levels last seen in the 1950s, because of budget cuts and an increased focus on satellite data sources. “They’ve fallen off a cliff,” says Julian Brimelow, who leads the Northern Hail Project at Western University and until recently worked at Environment and Climate Change Canada .
A shift from stations operated by volunteers to automated instruments has also compromised observations. Although automated stations can provide frequent records of temperature and humidity, their measurements are less diverse than those at crewed stations, Way says. That’s why the number of weather stations that provide reliable measurements of anything much beyond temperature in the far northDeveloping a sensor to measure snow depth is particularly tricky.
ECCC’s Meteorological Service is very aware of the deficiencies in its northern network, says Paul Joe, a retired ECCC radar specialist who has tested equipment in Arctic research sites. “The basic statement that the observing network in the Arctic is inadequate, no one would disagree with that.
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