Environment Canada Warning Preparedness Meteorologists Doug Lundquist.

Image Credit: Submitted/Jessica Lundquist

When Canadians start their day by checking out the Environment Canada weather forecast they likely don’t realize that the men and women behind those forecasts are also helping save them from tragedy.

Last year was a perfect example of how weather can dramatically change, and even end lives in B.C., with its heat dome, atmospheric rivers and forest fires.

“Before the heat event here last year, I remember telling my colleagues, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this. This is going to be off the charts.’” Doug Lundquist, the only Environment Canada meteorologist based in the Interior of B.C. (in Kelowna), told iNFOnews.ca. “I was freaked out. I remember doing media in Kamloops. They could hear the stress in my voice.”

READ MORE: One more day of the heat wave pushes Okanagan and Canadian records even higher

That heat dome, as Lundquist predicted at the time, broke all time Canadian heat records.

It also claimed the lives of 526 people in B.C., including 57 in the Thompson-Okanagan.

READ MORE: 57 heat dome fatalities in Thompson-Okanagan

That contributed to one of the worst forest fire seasons on record, destroying most of the town of Lytton along with dozens of homes on the west side of Okanagan Lake and at Monte Creek.

It was followed by atmospheric rivers that washed out all four highways connecting the Lower Mainland to the rest of the province, killing hundreds of cows, thousands of hogs and hundreds of thousands of poultry.

“This was the worst year for the number of events, ever,” Lundquist, who has been in the business for 34 years, said. “It tired me out. It tired everybody out. I’ve seen a lot of disasters over the years but never that many in one year, I think that’s partly climate changing and partly Mother Nature just has a certain natural variability to it.”

What’s becoming increasingly crucial is the ability to forecast when major weather events will hit and get people like emergency services briefed in time to take preventative action.

“The future of meteorology, for the government, is forecasting high impact weather at the storm centres, like my colleagues in Vancouver and Edmonton, and for communicating it to the partners and collaborating with them,” Lundquist said.

He also wants the service go beyond its current bland region-wide forecasts.

“Right now we forecast one temperature for a region,” Lundquist said. “In the middle of winter, when our daytime high is only one degree off our daytime low, we’re wrong for 90% of the city. Down by the lake it’s warmer than we forecast and up in Joe Rich it’s way colder. So it’s not really very useful, especially in the season when it matters in mid-winter when we’re hovering around zero and it’s dangerous on the roads. Granted, in the middle of summer, what’s a degree here or there?

“What I said to my colleagues is, we need to develop a system – and they’re working on this – where we have automated forecasts that give you more places on the map. It would be a grid-based thing so you could click down by the lake or higher up. I don’t know if there’s enough human power to be able to do that in British Columbia for every spot, but there is an ability to have an automated forecast to help out.”

That could go further than just informing the general public about localized temperatures.

“The one last place that I really dream about –  that is the big gap that’s hard to know how to fill – is the highways and making us safe out our roads,” Lundquist said. “I believe there’s a lot more information we have in our weather office that we aren’t able to get out to them – not necessarily to the general population but to the crews that are making us safe.”

While referred to as a meteorologist with Environment Canada, Lundquist is one of three “warning preparedness meteorologists” in B.C. and one of about 18 in Canada who work in conjunction with forecasters who spend more of their time on computers working forecast models.

That’s not the kind of work Lundquist likes to do and one reason he turned away from studying engineering in Grande Prairie many years ago, after growing up in the Peace River area of Alberta.

“I found it (engineering) too much book work in the sense it was not real world applicable and I love nature,” Lundquist said. “I always loved to be outside and look at what Mother Nature had to give us, from scenery through to the weather. When I switched to the University of Alberta in Edmonton I decided to go into meteorology because it combined the science with the beauty of nature and enjoying what Mother Nature had to give us and the art of it.”

He started his career on loan to the Canadian military as part of the Canadian Weather Service, spent time with the B.C. Forest Service during fire season and has travelled extensively throughout B.C. and the Yukon to better understand the geography that so influences the weather here.

When he graduated in 1987 there were computers but things like satellite photos were printed by hand and moved around to try to figure out where weather systems would move.

“Back at the very beginning, two days down the road we wouldn’t know how the weather would work out,” Lundquist said. “We forecast by using old fashioned techniques like moving high pressure systems on the map and extrapolating them and using rules of thumb to forecast where they’d be.”

He moved to Vancouver in 1989, after his stint with the military, which had the first satellite desk in the country, set up after a bad storm was poorly forecast and several fishermen died off the coast of B.C. That put the satellite photos onto a monitor.

In 1993 he moved to the Mountain Weather Station in Kelowna where his communication skills were highly valued.

“We were doing both the work of predicting and communicating,” he said. “That was probably the glory days of meteorology in the sense that I got to do both.”

That station closed in 2004 with the rest of the staff relocating to Edmonton and Vancouver.

While more of a communicator than a full-time forecaster, Lundquist prides himself in being able to outperform the computer models and the forecasters, as he did before the heat dome hit last year.

“More than half my colleagues didn’t believe me,” he said. “They knew it was going to be hot but they didn’t believe me that it would be that extreme.”

He also predicted the record-breaking warm weather on Feb. 7, when he was interviewed by iNFOnews.ca.

READ MORE: Record-breaking warm temperatures in Thompson-Okanagan

“I told my colleagues last week today will be a hot day,” Lundquist said. “I said there would be temperatures getting into the teens and, in Southern Washington it would be close to 20 and they said: ‘Oh my god, you’re smoking something.’ And it is close to 20 in Southern Washington – 18, 19 degrees – and it’s almost 12 out there now.

“I’ve had enough experience over the years that I can out-forecast the models, which is getting rare. The younger forecasters, I don’t know if they always can, at least until they get a few years under their belts and know the uniqueness of British Columbia.”

It’s the balance of experience and the computer skills of those in the Vancouver storm center – skills he doesn’t profess to match – that makes the system work effectively in B.C., he said.

“The storm centre looks to us for the longer range forecast,” Lundquist explained. “In the shorter range we look to them. For example, we knew the pattern, in general, was going to be very wet in the Lower Mainland for the time in which it flooded but the actual place where the atmospheric river was going to line up, wasn’t clear until right beforehand. So, the forecast to rain in Sechelt compared to Vancouver compared to Hope, I would get better information from talking to my colleagues in Vancouver because they’re looking at that in that fine scale detail, where I’m the big picture. I’ve always been a big picture person so I do well at it. We kind of have different areas of expertise. As long as we communicate with each other, it works well.”

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