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The Toronto 2015 Pan and Parapan American Games Experience

Foreword from the Project’s Senior Executive

This 2015 Pan and Parapan American Games project report summarizes the activities that were carried out by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to fulfill our mandate to help protect the health and safety of Canadians and our international guests during the Games.

ECCC’s Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) is an essential service of the federal government. It contributes to the health, safety and economic prosperity of Canadians by providing accurate and accessible information on weather, climate, water and ice conditions across Canada. The MSC helps safeguard Canadians from environmental emergencies (natural or human-made), and provides support to other federal departments with security mandates, such as the Department of National Defence, Public Safety Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The MSC has been serving Canadians since 1871, when the national weather service was created to provide warnings to mariners on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. Today, the MSC is part of a nation-wide service that provides public and marine weather forecasts and alerts while operating everything from radar and lightning detection networks to ocean buoys and automated land weather stations. For the Games, ECCC strategically designed and installed a high-resolution multi-platform network of state-of-the-art, automated atmospheric monitoring instruments across the Games footprint in southern Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe Area. Data from this network was used by our forecasters to produce venue-specific forecasts and alerts. Scientists are also using this data to evaluate both atmospheric research and technological innovations to continuously improve upon severe weather detection and early warning notification. In this way, the work done by the Project Team benefited ECCC, and ultimately every Canadian, in a variety of different ways.

Weather products are among the most frequently used of the federal government services, which was also the case during the Games. Our forecasts and alerts were used by the Toronto 2015 (TO2015) Games organizers, volunteers, athletes and security teams in support of safety and security. There is a long history of ECCC providing quality service to Canadians, and I am proud to say that this tradition continued in full force pre-, during and post-Games.

Michel Jean
Director General
Canadian Centre for Meteorological and Environmental Prediction

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