On blustery, rain drenched days like today, the School-Based Weather Station Network is an interesting place to explore. It’s at victoriaweather.ca.
The website, coordinated by the University of Victoria, has readings from automated weather stations at schools all over Greater Victoria, plus a sprinkling of spots around the Island.
You’re greeted by a map with temperature bands. Those temperatures can sometimes vary widely, a reminder of why someone in Colwood might be seeing snow while someone else in Saanich is looking at a cloudy sky.
A location list allows you to get data from specific schools.
A related iPhone and iPad app is available; there’s a download link at the site. That app allows you to gather favourite school locations. Weather information from those locations is summarized in a list on a single screen, allowing immediate comparisons of temperature, wind speed and precipitation at several schools.
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There’s also The Weather Network site, which is affiliated with timescolonist.com.
Plus Environment Canada’s forecast site for Greater Victoria.
Environment Canada lists conditions for the last 24 hours. But it does not include precipitation amounts. You have to go to the school weather stations for that.
Find "climate normals" for Victoria International Airport by clicking on this link. It's based on data collected between 1971 and 2000.
More recent data, for 1981-2010, is available, but hasn't been converted into an easy-to-read format yet. Go to the "click here" link at Environment Canada's Climate site; you might get a request for a password — leave it blank, and connect. You can download data for all of Canada in a very large file. Or download the file specific to Victoria by going to the English_CSV_files folder, then the BC folder, and selecting the file that begins with BC_SIMI-WOOD. What a process. Information about Victoria is in the V section.
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And for the big picture, there’s the weather page in the Times Colonist print edition, which has a Weather Network map that neatly summarizes the forecast for Canada and the U.S., plus the location of lows, highs, cold and warm fronts, and the jet stream.
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