Weather radio comes to Cape Dorset

MIRIAM HILL

Cape Dorset now has weather radio service thanks to the government of Nunavut and Environment Canada.

Weather radio is a continuous broadcast running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year that could include weather warnings, observations, marine forecasts or tide information. Iqaluit has had weather radio since 1999, both on the public broadcast and the FM band.

Cape Dorset residents will be able to access the continually updated forecasts at 162.550 on the public broadcast band or by phoning (867) 897-9910.

Weather radio started in 1976 in Canada. By early summer, other communities in Nunavut should be able to access their own weather forecasts as well without waiting for them to be broadcast on the radio or on TV.

Yvonne Bilan-Wallace, a meteorologist with Environment Canada based in Edmonton, says the decision to choose Cape Dorset was made by the GN and had to do with search and rescue concerns and the availability of a tower for the necessary equipment.

The money for the project came from the Nunavut government’s search and rescue secretariat. The government will also pay for its maintenance.

“You can write the best forecasts in the world in Edmonton for the North, but if people can’t get the information, it doesn’t make any difference,” she says. “This is one small step in ensuring at least one community has better access to information and from the perspective of the GN, maybe reducing the number of search and rescue activities and we all want to see that.”

A forecaster sitting at his or her desk in Edmonton types in the forecast, Bilan-Wallace explains, before pushing a transmit button that sends the information to Environment Canada computers. The file is then sent to another computer program that takes the phrases in the forecast and translates them into a real voice.

“So it kind of glues a bunch of phrases together with an actor who has recorded all these thousands and thousands of phrases,” she says. “This information goes from the computer through the phone lines to this special box in Cape Dorset, which then uses it to transmit on the air waves.”

If the weather changes in Cape Dorset, within five minutes that information is loaded, depending on how busy the phone lines and computers are.

“If a warning goes out, or a forecast is updated or revised, this information is not instantaneous, but it goes from Edmonton to Cape Dorset that quickly,” she said.

While people in Cape Dorset need a weather radio receiver to receive the broadcast, they can also use family service radios that have a broadcast range of about two kilometres.

“If you’re going out on the land and the kids are in a boat somewhere out on the water, or they’re a couple of kilometres away, you can communicate with your kids and you can also pick up the weather forecast at the same time,” Bilan-Wallace says.

Communications devices that people use out on the land can also be reprogrammed to pick up weather radio.

In most locations, the signal from the weather equipment transmits about 60 kilometres, but Bilan-Wallace estimates the broadcast goes out about 30 kilometres in Cape Dorset because of the height of the tower where the equipment is mounted.

“It just kills me every time I read in the newspaper about another weather-related fatality. And the people going out and rescuing people, their lives are being put at risk too,” she says.