Mesonet Marine Stations Observations: Buoy 45155 - TO2015 Pan and Parapan American Games

English: The high spatial and temporal resolution network was comprised of new automated land- and marine-based weather stations, and additional experimental monitoring platforms. Environment and Climate Change Canada (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. To track the lake breeze, existing land and marine monitoring capacity was identified and expanded to define the Mesonet.

The Games hosted a number of open-water events in the inner harbour and south of the Toronto Islands, an area where the competition or logistics could be affected by thunderstorms, severe weather or heat stress. Marine buoys were part of the Mesonet system of additional monitoring technologies, with higher than standard temporal reporting, put in place to inform the ECCC forecast process. The more frequent reporting of marine weather conditions was a test and evaluation designed to determine whether it could provide an improvement in marine forecast accuracy or response times for alerts during active marine weather conditions.

The AXYS WatchKeeper™ buoy is a self-contained, solar-powered data acquisition system outfitted with a suite of meteorological and oceanographic instrumentation to measure wind speed and direction, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, water temperature, and wave height, period and direction. This WatchKeeper™ buoy is the first in Canada outfitted with a cellular modem to enable the transmission of weather reports every 10 minutes (standard is once per hour), directly to CMC in Montréal.

All data in these datasets are essentially ‘raw’, having undergone only minimal automated Quality Control (QC). The user is referred to an additional Instrumentation Metadata XLS file posted with the Datasets that describes specific data issues that the users must be aware of before using the datasets.

Francais: The high spatial and temporal resolution network was comprised of new automated land- and marine-based weather stations, and additional experimental monitoring platforms. Environment and Climate Change Canada (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. To track the lake breeze, existing land and marine monitoring capacity was identified and expanded to define the Mesonet.

The Games hosted a number of open-water events in the inner harbour and south of the Toronto Islands, an area where the competition or logistics could be affected by thunderstorms, severe weather or heat stress. Marine buoys were part of the Mesonet system of additional monitoring technologies, with higher than standard temporal reporting, put in place to inform the ECCC forecast process. The more frequent reporting of marine weather conditions was a test and evaluation designed to determine whether it could provide an improvement in marine forecast accuracy or response times for alerts during active marine weather conditions.

The AXYS WatchKeeper™ buoy is a self-contained, solar-powered data acquisition system outfitted with a suite of meteorological and oceanographic instrumentation to measure wind speed and direction, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, water temperature, and wave height, period and direction. This WatchKeeper™ buoy is the first in Canada outfitted with a cellular modem to enable the transmission of weather reports every 10 minutes (standard is once per hour), directly to CMC in Montréal.

All data in these datasets are essentially ‘raw’, having undergone only minimal automated Quality Control (QC). The user is referred to an additional Instrumentation Metadata XLS file posted with the Datasets that describes specific data issues that the users must be aware of before using the datasets.