To read an article entitled, "Environment Canada to slash 776 jobs" please click on the following link:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Environment+Canada+slash+jobs/5208933/story.html
Why is the Government of Canada reducing the number of scientists who are involved in researching climate change, weather forecasting and protecting nature? Apparently,according to this article people who are losing their jobs in weather forecasting are losing them as a result of the fact that the government of Canada would rather have automated weather stations gathering weather information than humans!!! How can the Government rationalize this?
According to the article, "Automatic Weather Stations for Agricultural and Other Applications" which you can read at:http://www.bom.gov.au/inside/services_policy/pub_ag/aws/aws.shtml ,:
AWS suffer a number of disadvantages. These are:
- Some elements are difficult to automate (e.g. cloud cover)
- AWS require a large capital investment
- AWS are less flexible than human observers
Why is the Government of Canada choosing to spend so much tax-payer money on AWS when this
money could be used for more important things? In addition why is the Government of Canada choosing
to employ technology which is not perfected for forecasting weather? I say this because at the website:
"At present, automated airport weather stations are unable to report a variety of meteorological conditions. These include:
- shallow or patchy fog
- blowing dust
- smoke
- falling ash
- volcanic eruptions
- tornadoes
- precipitation that is not in the form of rain or snow, such as hail, ice pellets and snow grains
- multiple forms of precipitation falling at the same time
- depth of new snowfall
- total snow depth
- in-cloud and cloud-to-cloud lightning
- clouds that are not directly above the station
- clouds that are more than twelve thousand feet above ground level
- cloud type
"Because many of these (conditions) can pose dangers to aircraft and all of these are of interest to the meteorological community, most of the busier airports also have part-time or full-time human observers which augment, or provide additional information to, the automated airport weather station's observations. Research is on-going to allow the automated stations to detect many of these phenomena.
Automated stations can also suffer from mechanical breakdown, requiring repair or replacement. This can be either due to physical damage (either natural or human caused), mechanical wear, or severe icing during winter weather. During system outages, human observers are often required to supplement missing or non-representative observations from the automated station."
So now we must ask the question: Is the Government of Canada placing Canadians who use aircraft flight, at risk by using these automated weather stations instead of humans? Is the Government placing all of us in more danger (in terns of possibly creating circumstances in which more aircraft may crash and kill passengers,crew members and innocent people on the ground,) by forcing Environment Canada to use AWS instead of humans, when these devices may not be suitable for use in certain kinds of weather conditions? I wonder!!
source of image:http://threemilesfinal.com/?tag=transport-canada
Automated stations can also suffer from mechanical breakdown, requiring repair or replacement. This can be either due to physical damage (either natural or human caused), mechanical wear, or severe icing during winter weather. During system outages, human observers are often required to supplement missing or non-representative observations from the automated station."
So now we must ask the question: Is the Government of Canada placing Canadians who use aircraft flight, at risk by using these automated weather stations instead of humans? Is the Government placing all of us in more danger (in terns of possibly creating circumstances in which more aircraft may crash and kill passengers,crew members and innocent people on the ground,) by forcing Environment Canada to use AWS instead of humans, when these devices may not be suitable for use in certain kinds of weather conditions? I wonder!!
source of image:http://threemilesfinal.com/?tag=transport-canada
