The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
BRENT LOUCKS: What\u2019s your take as far as some of these changes Environment Canada\u2019s come up with? What is the polygon-based warning system all about?<\/p>\n
JENNY HAGAN: It\u2019s long overdue, that\u2019s for sure. The U.S. has had it in place for just about a decade. A polygon encompasses a smaller warning area, so it\u2019s going to only warn the areas that are actually in the path of the most dangerous part of a storm.<\/p>\n
With our current warning system a whole area is warned, and people behind the storm are getting a warning that they\u2019re not even at a risk of being hit.<\/p>\n
LOUCKS: What is it about this warning system that is more refined?<\/p>\n
HAGAN: It goes by town and community rather than the whole region, so you don\u2019t see the whole Kindersley region or whole Saskatoon region warned. It\u2019ll be refined right down to those communities and people that are in the path, the RMs.<\/p>\n
LOUCKS: With the alerts and the colour coding is it information overload?<\/p>\n
HAGAN: There is a bit of information overload.<\/p>\n
I find the more warnings that go out, it hurts the confidence in those forecasts because you\u2019re just constantly getting them and eventually you just put your phone aside.<\/p>\n
LOUCKS: Is it in their radar that they\u2019ve made the changes?\u00a0<\/p>\n
HAGAN: It\u2019ll be in their system. When you pull the warning map up, they\u2019re 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\u2019re not even in the area of the storms.<\/p>\n
LOUCKS: What about coverage in the northern part of the province?<\/p>\n
HAGAN: Environment Canada has upgraded their radar systems to cover a broader area. It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
With the work that Northern Tornadoes Project has done, we\u2019ve found that quite a few tornadoes touched down in northern areas, and they\u2019re harder to forecast and confirm. Now with technology evolving, a satellite can say a tornado has hit here, even in those areas that don\u2019t necessarily have radar coverage.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t see those storms coming as well. So radar would be an important thing up in those northern areas.<\/p>\n
LOUCKS: Do you think Environment Canada will be doing upgrades on our weather radar?<\/p>\n
HAGAN:\u00a0 I think it\u2019s going to take a very long time. We\u2019re going to be behind the curve probably by a decade.<\/p>\n
LOUCKS: Is the polygon-based warning system now in place?<\/p>\n
HAGAN: Yes. It was originally supposed to be launchedat the very beginning of our peak severe weather season but it got delayed.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve rolled it out now, which is a little late in the season because you\u2019re usually seeing storms die down about this time of the year. Crops are entering full maturity, so we don\u2019t have as much moisture to play with down in that lower atmosphere that really fuels severe weather.<\/p>\n
It\u2019ll definitely bring some benefits for next summer for severe weather.<\/p>\n
Read more:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. BRENT LOUCKS: What\u2019s your take as far as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":859524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-859523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/859524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}