Log in & Sign up
You are not logged in.
Most Commented
McGill weather station still off-line
Alycia Ambroziak
The Gazette
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Weather junkies who have been missing regular doses of rainfall and wind velocity data from the McGill University weather station – officially known as the J.S. Marshall Radar Observatory in Ste. Anne de Bellevue – will have to wait at least another month to get a fix.
“Some gears within the antennae system broke down about a month ago,” said Fréderic Sabry, a professor of atmospheric science at McGill. “We’ve had to initiate some repairs ... and the gears had to be shipped to Texas to be refitted.
“It should take about another month before we are operational again.”
Sabry noted that the weather station – for many travellers along Highway 40, it is the structure that looks like a big white golf ball sitting on a gigantic tee – is 40 years old this year.
The observatory, a component of McGill’s
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department, houses several weather radar systems and other meteorological sensors.
Although the observatory’s main purpose is teaching and research – students upgrade and design radar systems, develop new ways to process radar signals and perform research on the physics of weather events and predictions – the observatory is also part of the Canadian weather radar network.
Weather observatories are nothing new to McGill: the first observatory was built in 1862 with instruments donated by Dr. Charles Smallwood, who had been doing his own weather-tracking since 1840. According to university archives, in 1943, Project Stormy Weather – aimed at finding a use for noise in weather-related radar echoes – was assigned to J.S. Marshall in Ottawa by
National Defence. Marshall, and his doctoral student, Walter Palmer, became well-known for their work that led to rain-rate relation to radar reflectivity. Just after the Second World War, Marshall and R. H. Douglas formed the Stormy Weather group at McGill and, in 1968, the observatory named after him was built at the Macdonald campus of McGill University in Ste. Anne de Bellevue.