What's New

October 11, 2006

Improved User Options in Radar Imagery Section

Changes to the radar section on this site expand user options to a significant degree! The improvements include: the provision of extra geographical references, easier navigation from one local radar site to another, and a "how to use" section.

The new geographic reference overlays include additional towns or cities, major road network and rivers which can be user selected or removed. In addition, a navigation footer enables users to easily navigate to nearby radar sites..

Finally, a user guide is also available providing information on how to better use the radar products.

Visit our radar imagery section to see the recent improvements! Comments regarding these changes can be made by visiting Contact Us.

July 20, 2006

World Weather Content Changes

International forecasts are now available from official sources. Environment Canada will no longer produce or display site-specific forecasts for non-Canadian locations. We will continue to link visitors to other web sites for current and forecast conditions outside Canada.

For the United States, visitors will be redirected to a web site for official information prepared by the U.S. National Weather Service at:http://www.nws.noaa.gov/.

For all other countries, visitors will be redirected to a web site by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which offers official weather information from each participating country at:http://www.worldweather.org/.

Dec 13, 2005

Afternoon Forecast Updates Have an Additional Time Period

Our "afternoon" updates of public 5-day weather forecasts now include an additional time period for the second night (from 6 pm to 6 am). The format is similar to the first night and the length of time covered by the forecast remains unchanged in our web site (up to day 5).

Visually, the afternoon icon presentation of forecasts changes from 5 boxes of information to 6, thus eliminating the empty grey box in the afternoon and evening.

May 18, 2005

Standard Region Names

New standard forecast region names are being introduced to our web site. These are the names used to describe forecast areas in the "weather warning" section or "text forecast" section of our web site. This improvement is part of an effort by the Meteorological Service of Canada to synchronise the names in all our internal systems using region names for weather forecast areas.

Many of the region name changes are minor however the changes do include a small number of redefined region boundaries. This synchronised change of May 18 may create brief disruptions or delays in the delivery of weather forecast info to our web pages during the transition to the new names.

January 26, 2005

New 5 day weather pages

Changes to the 5 day weather pages are here! In order to serve these popular web pages more efficiently, the software processes to serve these pages have been modified. This review has brought many basic improvements which include:

Navigation

  • Left menu highlight to indicate your position in the menu
  • Improved printing - print function in browser menu prints in one page
  • URL addresses have changed to remove the dependency which prevented the use of a weather observation for two or more cities

Presentation

  • Newer graphic style on two rows
  • Order of max and min temperatures adjusted
  • Moved the "normals" from the text forecast to the left column
  • Use of falling or rising temperature text for Day 1 graphic icon.

Content

  • Now, 97% of the 5 day weather pages will have current conditions
  • Review of the page names and lat/long coordinates for sunrise/sunset times
  • Inclusion of the observation station name for .current conditions
  • Added .record values. data to the city page through a link

July 15, 2004

  • New Weather Map Style

    • As we renew our web site, visitors will notice graphical improvements to the site. One of the first changes to our web pages is the adoption of a new graphical map style for web pages used to present weather information. Initial map changes will be the 5 day weather content section including the Canada map and provincial maps in addition to the same style for the weather warning and special weather statement web pages.

  • Colour Numerical Model Charts

    • Colour forecast weather maps are now available on the "weather maps" section of our web site for both the regional and global models. This addition is a first step towards improving the user- friendly access to numerical weather model data output. Changes planned for the future include improvements such as animation functionality as well as a broader range of information products.

February 26, 2004

  • Changes to Environment Canada's UV Index program. The UV index is now included in the forecast, rounded off to the nearest whole number (no decimals), whenever it is forecast to be of 3 or more, regardless of the season. The categories of the UV index have also changed to follow international recommendations. More details on this page. Link to page http://www.msc-smc.ec.gc.ca/topics/uv/change2004_e.html

December 15, 2003

  • Radar improvements

    • Recent improvements to our weather radar data continue. Our radar images now include new backgrounds with common place name references to assist users. This follows the Oct 30 change to the frequency of updates which introduced radar images that are now updated every 10 minutes instead of 20 minutes. Finally, one additional change can be expected this year - the installation of a new radar site in interior British Columbia ( Prince George ).The data from this radar is expected later this month once testing has been completed.

December 1, 2003

September 8, 2003

  • Radar Imagery available for Northwestern Ontario

    • The latest radar in Environment Canada's network of Doppler Radar sites has been installed at Dryden, Ontario. Radar imagery will now be available for a significant portion of Northwestern Ontario including Thunder Bay westwards to the Manitoba border and northwards to the communities of Red Lake and Pickle Lake. Three more Doppler Radars installations are planned as part of the National Radar Network. These stations will be installed later this year; one in Northern Ontario (Kapuskasing-Timmins), another in interior British Columbia (Prince George) and the one in New Brunswick (Chipman). Watch for these additional radar sites over the next few months.

August 8, 2003

July 2, 2003

  • Radar Image Update Frequency Change

    • As of July 2, 2003, our radar images on the site are updated every 20 minutes compared to the previous 1 hour frequency. This will permit web visitors to have more timely access to our radar data. Watch for other planned improvements to our radar content over the next few months.

April 8, 2003

February 20, 2003

  • Our Web pages now include two additional options:

    1. A function to turn off most graphical elements from a page. This reduces the size of a page and should accelerate downloading for people who have slow connections to the Internet. To activate this function, click on the words "Graphics off" found near the bottom of our pages. To deactivate it, click on "Graphics on" at the same location on our pages.

    2. A function to format pages for printing. This removes the menu to the left of the page and should ensure that no portion of the page gets cut off to the right. To activate this function, click on the words "Format for print" found near the bottom of our pages.

For additional information about what's new on this and other sites, please see :



Created: 2002-12-31
Modified: 2004-07-13
Reviewed: 2002-12-31
URL of this page: http://weather.ec.gc.ca/mainmenu/whats_new_e.html

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