As the official source for severe weather alerts in Canada, Environment Canada (EC) provides timely, accurate information about severe weather events to Canadians 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Twitter-based weather alerts are EC’s latest tool to disseminate its weather alerts to millions of Canadians. This new automated weather alert messaging using Twitter is based on information contained in the weather alerts issued by our meteorologists whenever dangerous weather conditions threaten. Canadians can select which communities they want to follow to receive a weather-alert tweet directly to their mobile phone, tablet or computer. Each tweet includes a link back to Canada.ca/weather, allowing users to read more details on the specific weather alert.
Given the growing number of organizations tweeting Canadian weather alert information, it is important for Canadians to have access to consistent, uniform and reliable information coming from the official source. The development of this new method to disseminate weather alerts allows more Canadians, media, businesses, municipalities and emergency organizations to have access to timely and location-specific severe weather information via Twitter.
Twitter accounts in English and French have been created for over 830 communities appearing on Canada.ca/weather. We expect an annual average of 25,000 warnings to be issued in total for the communities served by the new system.
Followers are also invited in each tweet to report severe weather they have observed via a hashtag per province. These provincial hashtags will be regularly monitored by regional meteorologists during severe weather events. The weather alert tweets can also be re-tweeted by followers.
A distinct image permits followers to quickly know when a weather alert is issued for their city.
For more information, visit our Canada.ca/weather How to subscribe to Twitter Weather Alerts page. You will also find information on the type of alerts you will be receiving, the list of hashtags per province and all the Twitter accounts for each city listed by province or territory.
Every Canada.ca/weather city page also has its own Twitter icon at the bottom of the page. By clicking on the icon, users can access the new EC weather alerts Twitter feed for their city by following us using their Twitter account.
