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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Bumper crop of weather stations

Farmers signing up for private network

By: Murray McNeill

Posted: 12/3/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Ian White displays the capabilities of the WeatherBug network for tracking temperatures and lightning through weather stations in Western Canada. (KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS )

A private network of more than 700 weather stations -- half of them owned by Western Canadian farmers -- is growing faster than a Prairie weed.

"The speed at which this has grown has surpassed all of our expectations," Canadian Wheat Board president and CEO Ian White told a Winnipeg news conference on Wednesday.

The CWB partnered with U.S.-based WeatherBug, a leading international provider of local weather information, to launch the private network in August 2007. At the time, the partners said they hoped that within three years they'd be harvesting data from 600 private weather stations in Western Canada.

But two years later, they already have more than 700 of them up and running on farms, grain elevators, agribusiness outlets, schools and government buildings.

The weather stations consist of monitoring equipment mounted on a pole. They collect detailed weather data for the immediate area, including temperature, wind speed, humidity and precipitation and upload the information onto the network via the Internet.

White said not only is the network exceeding growth expectations, but it's on track to revolutionize the way weather information is gathered, shared and used in Canada by farmers, business, media, government and the public.

What differentiates the CWB/WeatherBug network from conventional networks is that the data is updated every five seconds and it has a lot more stations. Environment Canada, by comparison, has only 130 stations in Western Canada, a CWB spokesperson said.

That means if a farmer in Manitoba pays the $1,750 to have a basic weather station installed, he can get up-to-the-minute information on weather conditions on his or her farm, which can help determine the best times to apply things like herbicides and pesticides, to predict crop yields or gauge the risk of frost.

The purpose of Wednesday's news conference was to not only update the media on the network's growth, but also to unveil two new features that should fuel even more growth by making the network more appealing to its targeted users -- Western Canadian farmers and agriculture-related businesses.

One is WeatherFarm, a new online weather centre that's offered free of charge to farmers and agri-businesses in Western Canada. The Internet website (www.weatherfarm.com) is designed to be a one-stop centre for up-to-the-minute general and localized weather data, as well as market information and farm news.

It also offers modelling tools and risk maps to help farmers predict and manage the risk of fusarium, wheat midge and sclerotinia (crop diseases), as well as frost severity.

The second new feature is the expansion of WeatherBug's Total Lightning Network into Western Canada.

The network provides advanced forecasting of severe weather phenomena such as tornadoes, damaging downburst winds and cloud-to-ground lightning strikes. It does that by using advanced sensors that not only detect cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, but also the cloud-to-cloud strikes that often proceed them.

WeatherBug president and CEO Bob Marshall said the first-time-in-Canada technology, coupled with WeatherBug's extensive network of weather stations, will enable it to forecast severe weather phenomena sooner that most weather networks. And that could help save lives and reduce property damage.

An Environment Canada official said the agency is not only sharing some of its data with the CWB/WeatherBug network, but investigating how it might be able to use the private network's data in compiling its forecasts. Although the CWB/WeatherBug network is intended for farmers and agriculture-related business, Marshall said WeatherBug plans to eventually expand its network into Eastern Canada through partnerships with other business sectors, such as electrical utilities, transportation companies, and government agencies.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 3, 2009 B6

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