TO2015 Pan and Parapan American Games Atmospheric Monitoring Observations

The Pan and Parapan American Games are a regional international summer sporting event, staged every 4 years in the year prior to the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. The 2015 Games were awarded to Canada on November 6, 2009, by the Pan American Sports Organization. The XVII Pan American Games and the V Parapan American Games were held in Toronto, Canada, from July 10–26, 2015, and from August 7–15, 2015, respectively. Canada welcomed the 40 other countries/nations of the Americas to Toronto and the municipalities of the Greater Golden Horseshoe Area in Ontario where the summer sports events of the 2015 Pan and Parapan American Games were hosted.

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC) mission and mandate for the TO2015 Games was to provide essential services for enhanced weather monitoring and forecasting and for local-level preparedness activities. The key objectives were to enhance public safety and decision making by: • issuing weather warnings; • forecasting weather conditions; • supporting critical weather sensitive government services; and • monitoring atmospheric conditions.

The funding received by ECCC was used to provide state-of-the-art, 24/7, dedicated, venue-specific weather services during the Games (i.e., 24 hours per day, 7 days per week).

This section focuses on the foundational piece of the Project on which the rest of the IT infrastructure and meteorological services were built: the atmospheric monitoring network known as the Mesonet. This high spatial and temporal resolution network was comprised of new automated land- and marine-based weather stations, and additional experimental monitoring platforms. ECCC designed the Mesonet to monitor weather at the venues, while providing close tracking of southern Ontario lake breezes, which can be associated with severe weather initiation and high air pollutant concentrations. Knowledge about lake-breeze location would also increase our understanding of heat and air quality patterns, particularly in the urban environment.

“Mesonet” combines the words “mesoscale” and “network,” where “mesoscale” refers to a scale of between a few kilometres to several hundred kilometres. Within ECCC, and the field of meteorology in general, a Mesonet is a network of weather stations designed to observe mesoscale meteorological phenomena. Mesoscale weather events or phenomena range in horizontal scale from generally 1 km to 250 km, with time spans from several minutes to several hours.