Precipitation and Temperature Averages by Province

Question

I am helping a graduate student who would like to obtain the following data for all Canadian provinces:

Average total precipitations AND temperature

• At the provincial level
• On an annual AND monthly basis
• For the latest 35 years available

Although it is easy to obtain this data for specific locations (weather stations) from the Historical Climate Data page (http://climate.weather.gc.ca/) , I could not find provincial averages anywhere. I am aware that precipitation and temperature averages at the provincial level should be treated with caution because there is got to be great variability between different locations on such large geographic entities, but nonetheless I have verified that this is what the student wants.

Answer(1)

I did manage to find the following resources:

Article - Precipitation trends in Canada
Summary Table - Weather conditions in capital and major cities
Environment Canada - Temperature and Precipitation information (note: non-Statistics Canada information)

Your student might find this of interest for Alberta… the data behind the visualization is from a national climate dataset:
Answer(2)
Alberta Climate Records
http://albertaclimaterecords.com/

• This visualization web site allows users to explore temperature trends and variability from a dataset of nearly 5 million observed climate records between 1950 and 2010 for 6,834 locations across the Province of Alberta.
• “The dataset originated from the National Land and Water Information Service (NLWIS), part of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), who released the daily 10km gridded climate dataset for Canada for the period 1951-2010. Grid values were interpolated from daily climate station recordings (Environment Canada).”
• Data can be exported from individual grid cells at bottom right of each grid “page.”

One possible source of this information is the Canadian Climate Normals web site http://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_normals/index_e.html

The site provides data for specific time periods 1961 – 1990; 1971 – 2000 and 1981 – 2010. It provides data by specific weather station name, by weather stations by province and by proximity to major cities in Canada. It does not provide data on the average for the temperature and precipitation by individual province. But the user can download CSV files of various weather station data and could work the data in order to derive the average temperature or precipitation for a province if they wanted to put the effort in to do this.

Answer(3)
“Even though we published data about temperature and precipitation in the past, we used data from Environment and Climate Change Canada in our publications. Here are a few links of interest for you client:

http://ec.gc.ca/dccha-ahccd/default.asp?lang=En&n=B1F8423A-1
http://climate.weather.gc.ca/prods_servs/cdn_climate_summary_e.html
http://climate.weather.gc.ca/historical_data/search_historic_data_e.html
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/environment/weather/data-research.html
http://www.ec.gc.ca/sc-cs/default.asp?lang=En&n=A3837393-1

But even if those links might be of interest to your client, they either don’t hold the information he is looking for or they are broken links. So, I think he will have to contact Environment and Climate Change Canada at this address ec.btvc-ctvb.ec@canada.ca or this address AHCCD@ec.gc.ca for daily adjusted climate data. I think he has a better to find the dataset he wants with the second email address.”

Air Pollution Data

Question

I've got a student who's looking for 2006 air pollution data (PM10, carbon monoxide, etc.) at the health region level. Something tells me that kind of information probably isn't collected by health region. I've found a few sites that have region data available, the Ontario Air Quality Index and CASA Data (Alberta) for example, but nothing national.

Does anyone know of other possible sources?

Answer

Our contacts in our Environment Accounts and Statistics Division have provided the following suggestions in response to your question:

"Health Canada has done a lot of work linking ambient air quality data to different geographies. We have also been involved in the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESI) inititative for the national ambient air qualtiy indicators, but these are not specifically linked to health regions.

The approach I suggest is to use the National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) data (available for download from the Environment Canada website). This can be combined via the Lat-Long coordinates for the sites with the health region geography in a geographical information systems (GIS) application. This would work for ambient air quality analysis.

If it is emissions that are the focus, then the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) is the main source of information. Since 2002, emissions of criteria air contaminants have been included in the NPRI. The inventory has emissions by facility, and the facilities are geo coded. This too could be coded to health regions with the appropriate GIS application. "

Air Pollution Data

Question

I've got a student who's looking for 2006 air pollution data (PM10, carbon monoxide, etc.) at the health region level. Something tells me that kind of information probably isn't collected by health region. I've found a few sites that have region data available, the Ontario Air Quality Index and CASA Data (Alberta) for example, but nothing national.

Does anyone know of other possible sources?

Answer

Our contacts in our Environment Accounts and Statistics Division have provided the following suggestions in response to your question:

"Health Canada has done a lot of work linking ambient air quality data to different geographies. We have also been involved in the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESI) inititative for the national ambient air quality indicators, but these are not specifically linked to health regions.

The approach I suggest is to use the National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) data (available for download from the Environment Canada website). This can be combined via the Lat-Long coordinates for the sites with the health region geography in a geographical information systems (GIS) application. This would work for ambient air quality analysis.

If it is emissions that are the focus, then the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) is the main source of information. Since 2002, emissions of criteria air contaminants have been included in the NPRI. The inventory has emissions by facility, and the facilities are geo coded. This too could be coded to health regions with the appropriate GIS application. "

Environmental and demographic data

Question

One of our PhD's is looking to find data at the lowest geographic level possible on as wide a variety of environmental indicators (air, water and soil qualities, climate, etc) and wants to marry that with a wide range of demographics (age, gender, ethnicity, income, etc) at the same level of geography. He'd like the data from the 1990's to the present.

We've looked at several sources but can't really find anything. The Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators provides data back to the 1990s but only at the national and/or provincial level.

Does anyone out there know whether these data would be available at lower levels of geography? He says he's heard of data collected at either the postal code or FSA area, but we haven't been able to locate them.

Answers

1. He might take a look at the paper by Buzelli et al. (2006) in Canadian Geographer 50(3): 376-391 for a method of estimating/interpolating such environmental data at the Census Tract scale in Vancouver.

2. Have you looked at the National Land and Water Information Service for some of the environmental data? The main data page is:
http://sis2.agr.gc.ca/cansis/

You might start with the Land Potential Database. It contains "data about soil, climate, physiography, land use, modelled constraint free (potential) crop yields, actual crop yields and soil degradation for all regions of Canada".
http://sis.agr.gc.ca/cansis/nsdb/lpdb/intro.html

3. Count Statistics Canada out for the data at that level of geography - and even if data was collected at a low level of geography,
it does not mean that it is reliable enough to publish at that level of geography. The counts of respondents plays a very important role in what level of geography is released (census vs. survey).

4. As an added piece of information, the Health Indicators project is working with Environment Account and Statistics Division in order to come up with indicators related to the environment. The major challenges are the level of geography and the link to the standard geography. When you talk about air, water and other environmental indicators, the standard boundaries are not always relevant. This is a challenge that needs to be addressed and in maybe two or three years, it may be possible to see some relevant data being released but not yet.

5. It depends whether the client wants to use an environmental boundary or census boundary. Agriculture Canada will soon be releasing Ag data at the sub-sub-basin level and soil landscape level. But most data are not available at this level.

Also, it depends on the type of data he is looking for. Waste management data, for instance, are only available at the provincial
level due to confidentiality.

6. A few more things your patron may want to look at:

Air quality/pollutants:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/pdb/npri/npri_preinfo_e.cfm#dbase

Canadian compendium on common air pollutants:
http://geodiscover.cgdi.ca/gdp/search?action=
entrySummary&entryType=productCollection&entryId=14393&entryLang=en

General ecological:
http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/Ecosystem/ecosystem.html

For climate:
http://www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca/hccd/
http://climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/
http://www.etcentre.org/naps/naps_data_e.html