Upgrades at Bethune radar station lead to some juggling

The weather station at Bethune may be down, but Environment Canada is confident that nothing nasty has flown under the radar.

“I have not received any information about any missed (weather) events for that reason or any other reason,” Natalie Hasell, a warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment Canada, said from Winnipeg. “I think we’ve managed to catch pretty much all of them.”

The Bethune radar station was taken offline in late May as part of the Government of Canada’s $95-million upgrades of its weather radar network. The Bethune station has required repairs at different times in previous years, but this work is part of a national refurbishing project.

The work on the Bethune station is slated to be done at the end of August.

According to the Environment Canada website, the absence of one radar station in the system isn’t a major concern. The organization said it can continue to provide “weather services by using data from neighbouring radars since, wherever possible, the coverage of the radars has been designed to overlap.”

As a result, the Bethune radar image currently is a composite of images from two stations in Saskatchewan — one in Radisson and one at Bratt’s Lake — as well as one station each in Alberta, Manitoba and Montana.

Hasell pointed out that the Bratt’s Lake radar — located on a farm 23 kilometres south of Regina — was deployed to fill the gap left when the Bethune station went down.

“It’s a smaller radar (and) it covers a smaller area as well,” Hasell said. “We do luckily still have the radars that are adjacent in the network to the Bethune radar, so we do still have decent coverage over the area that Bethune normally covers.

“There are a few gaps but they’re not particularly large.”

A look at an image of Saskatchewan on the Environment Canada website shows there is a gap in radar coverage to the west of Moose Jaw and another one straight north of Regina near Wynyard.

So far, there haven’t been any storms that sprung up without warning in those holes. And for stormchaser Craig Boehm, the gaps caused by Bethune’s absence haven’t been an issue.

“Early on, (missing the Bethune radar) was a little bit of a frustration, but Environment Canada has been really good communicating with the public and kind of letting us know just to be patient with them,” Boehm said.

“As soon as they got the replacement radar up and running so that we do have that coverage, it has been smooth sailing.”

Hasell noted that the upgrades to the Bethune radar will result in a different band being used, dual polarization (to allow meteorologists to better differentiate between types of precipitation) and an improved range for Doppler capacity.

The new system will have a 240-kilometre range of Doppler coverage, twice that of its predecessor.

There have been a few severe weather events in southern Saskatchewan since the Bethune radar was taken offline in May, but Boehm said he and his fellow stormchasers didn’t miss any of them.

Neither did Environment Canada.

“Pretty much the whole southern (part of the) province does have radar, just not maybe the high-resolution radar that we’re kind of getting used to, especially with the new radar that’s coming online,” Boehm said.

The timing of the work on the Bethune station may not be ideal — it’s being done during a season rife with severe thunderstorms and occasional tornado warnings — but Hasell said it had to be done for the upgrades to be completed.

“If you had a fleet of cars that you had to replace, you can’t replace them all at once because that would be impossible, but you do need to replace the tech that you use …,” she said.

“Other radars were down (in the past) across the prairies at different times which were just as busy or just as active. It’s just a necessity. (Each part of the system) has to be down at some point and this happens to be when this one was scheduled to be down.”