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Environment Canada has launched a new, more targeted system of weather alerts that will allow their experts to draw shapes on a map.
Severe weather specialist Jenny Hagan joined The Evan Bray Show with guest host Brent Loucks on Friday to give her take on the change, on the active summer, and the quality of weather forecasting in the province.
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
BRENT LOUCKS: What’s your take as far as some of these changes Environment Canada’s come up with? What is the polygon-based warning system all about?
JENNY HAGAN: It’s long overdue, that’s for sure. The U.S. has had it in place for just about a decade. A polygon encompasses a smaller warning area, so it’s going to only warn the areas that are actually in the path of the most dangerous part of a storm.
With our current warning system a whole area is warned, and people behind the storm are getting a warning that they’re not even at a risk of being hit.
LOUCKS: What is it about this warning system that is more refined?
HAGAN: It goes by town and community rather than the whole region, so you don’t see the whole Kindersley region or whole Saskatoon region warned. It’ll be refined right down to those communities and people that are in the path, the RMs.
LOUCKS: With the alerts and the colour coding is it information overload?
HAGAN: There is a bit of information overload.
I find the more warnings that go out, it hurts the confidence in those forecasts because you’re just constantly getting them and eventually you just put your phone aside.
LOUCKS: Is it in their radar that they’ve made the changes?
HAGAN: It’ll be in their system. When you pull the warning map up, they’re going to be for smaller areas. It might not fix the alerts you get via your cellphone for severe weather alerts because they are sent out for the mobile area. So you can sometimes get those popping up when you’re not even in the area of the storms.
LOUCKS: What about coverage in the northern part of the province?
HAGAN: Environment Canada has upgraded their radar systems to cover a broader area. It wasn’t too long ago, even down in Eatonia, that I was in a radar dead zone before they upgraded those radars, both in Saskatoon and over in Schuler (Alberta). Hopefully, we will see those radars move up into our northern areas of the province.
With the work that Northern Tornadoes Project has done, we’ve found that quite a few tornadoes touched down in northern areas, and they’re harder to forecast and confirm. Now with technology evolving, a satellite can say a tornado has hit here, even in those areas that don’t necessarily have radar coverage.
You can’t see those storms coming as well. So radar would be an important thing up in those northern areas.
LOUCKS: Do you think Environment Canada will be doing upgrades on our weather radar?
HAGAN: I think it’s going to take a very long time. We’re going to be behind the curve probably by a decade.
LOUCKS: Is the polygon-based warning system now in place?
HAGAN: Yes. It was originally supposed to be launchedat the very beginning of our peak severe weather season but it got delayed.
They’ve rolled it out now, which is a little late in the season because you’re usually seeing storms die down about this time of the year. Crops are entering full maturity, so we don’t have as much moisture to play with down in that lower atmosphere that really fuels severe weather.
It’ll definitely bring some benefits for next summer for severe weather.
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