Long Term Climate Extremes, Virtual Climate Stations

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.