In Canada, federal, provincial, and municipal agencies, academic institutions, hydro-utilities, and others collect and store climate data. Only data that are collected to Atmospheric Environment Program (AEP) approved standards are included in the Environment Canada National Climate Archive. Climate stations in the National Climate Archive constitutes the "climate network" discussed here. Some stations of the network have continuous records dating back 150 years. 75% of the stations in the network are operated by volunteers and cooperative agencies. The size of the network has decreased from over 2900 in 1991 to less than 2500 at present. The main causes for the decreases are budget cuts at all levels of government and cooperative agencies. In addition, the number of volunteer observers has decreased. In the past 10 years, many principal weather stations (measuring hourly data) were automated but some of the supplementary (rainfall intensity, sunshine, soil temperature, evaporation) climate programs at these stations were not automated simultaneously.
In 1996, a major effort was begun by AEP to modernize the climate network over the next ten years. The purpose of the project is to automate stations in the Reference Climate Station network of Canada using new or existing sensors and data acquisition platforms. The Reference Network consists of over 200 active climate stations with over 30 years of continuous data. For the first two years, the project is evaluating various commercial available automatic precipitation gauges and data loggers to choose a "standard" for the network. Data acquisition software and guidelines for installing climate stations are being refined by AEP-staff in Edmonton (Alberta). Five demonstration sites are being set up at Edmonton International Airport (Alberta), Deerwood (Manitoba), La Pocatiere (Quebec), Fredericton (Atlantic), and CARE (Ontario) to test telecommunication, instrumentation, and other logistics. At the same time, human and automatic machine observations are compared for a number of sites across Canada. The long-term impacts of automation on the climate archives will be evaluated.