Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC)

What We Do

The Meteorological Service of Canada:

• provides weather forecasts and warnings of high-impact weather events and, together with the provinces, produces information on hazardous air quality;

• monitors atmospheric conditions and the quantity of water in Canadian lakes and rivers;

• forecasts ice and wave conditions on navigable oceans and inland waters;

• monitors and predicts the state of the climate;

• leads the development of atmospheric science and related environmental prediction in Canada; and,

• is Canada's primary source of weather warnings, and the principal scientific authority for standards, information and advice on the past, present and future states of the atmosphere, hydrosphere (lakes, rivers and oceans) and cryosphere (snow and ice).

Serving Canadians

Weather services are among the most frequently used federal government services. Polls show that virtually all Canadians surveyed (92 per cent) listen to at least one weather forecast daily.

Annually, the MSC issues approximately 14 000 severe weather warnings and 3500 ice hazard warnings, and provides about 500 000 public weather forecasts, 200 000 marine weather forecasts and 400 000 aviation forecasts.

The mass media are our primary means of reaching Canadians, and are vital to ensuring that Canadians receive weather information (especially warnings) in a timely manner.

Weather information can also be accessed via the following Environment Canada dissemination systems:

• Weatheradio: bilingual weather information is continually broadcast over Weatheradio VHF frequencies.

• Internet: visits to MSC's weather web pages at weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca are increasing at a rate of 12 percent per month. During the last quarter of 2001-02, the MSC weather site received 600 million hits corresponding to 75 million pages viewed during 19 million visits.
  

• Telephone: free recorded messages provide basic public forecasts, and a 1-900 user-pay phone service enables callers to speak directly to a meteorologist 24 hours a day.

Serving Others

Monitoring

Data are critical to the environmental prediction process. In Canada, information on weather, air quality, ice, snow and water are gathered through an array of observation networks—some based on the ground or in water, and others operating from the upper atmosphere and space.

The Green Lane^TM,
Environment Canada's World Wide Web Site.