Meteorologist in eye of storm as climate calamities unfold
Meteorologist Armel Castellan has no difficulty identifying the year when the climate emergency changed his job dramatically.
“In 2017, we turned a pretty big corner,” the warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada said. “That year was a strong wildfire year. In fact, it was record-breaking at the time, only to be outdone in 2018 by (total) hectares burned.”
Castellan said while B.C. has always had rainstorms in the fall and winter and wildfires in the summer, they are now not only more extreme in their intensity, they are also happening more frequently.
Castellan's job is to translate complex forecasts into a language people can understand.
“We have to interpret the forecast, make it digestible, and connect the dots to their world,” he said. “Even if we're as perfect as you can get with our forecast, what's the point if nobody takes corrective action or their behaviour doesn't change? Our mandate is to keep Canadians, their properties, and businesses safe. You better have your message correct, make it matter, and speak to the average person.”
Castellan, who started working as a federal meteorologist in 2007, has become more prominent this year because of his role speaking to the media about B.C.'s extreme weather. On a busy day, for example, he and his team of four may have to handle as many as 50 media requests.
Due to the recent consecutive days of extreme weather, Environment Canada has been issuing its own news releases along with organizing fully bilingual technical briefings.
Castellan's day can include a daily morning briefing with B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth, as well as briefings throughout the day with officials in Emergency Management B.C.
The weather forecasts Castellan communicates to the public start with various models produced by the Environment Canada weather supercomputer, which he described as one of the most sophisticated in the world. Located in Dorval, Que., it is capable of performing 2,444 trillion calculations per second.
He said one high-resolution weather model divides the atmosphere into one-kilometre three-dimensional grids — a level of sophistication unheard of 20 years ago.
“Today, there's a storm we were tracking from the Philippines that started six days ago,” he said Wednesday. “That's in a way unbelievable. The modelling power in the supercomputer has reached such an extraordinary level.”
Once the computer-generated models perform their tasks, it's up to meteorologists to take into account their relative strengths and weaknesses.
“We use the models because they are very powerful, but we know they have limitations,” he said.
Castellan makes a point when he is talking to people to tell a larger story about what's happening with the weather.
He likes to quote Jim Pojar, a B.C. forest ecologist and natural history author, who starts speeches by saying, “Ecology is not rocket science. It's way more complicated.”
Castellan said that is not to play down the difficulty of rocket science, but to point out the incredible complexity of natural systems where all the variables aren't known and are often connected to and influence one another.
Recent flooding in southwest B.C., for example, was connected to the cumulative amount of rain falling in a short period of time. It was also linked to several record-breaking wildfire seasons that reduced tree cover on mountainsides and the vegetation that would normally have helped to absorb and slow water running into streams and rivers.
He said the interconnectedness this year also included the “almost unfathomable” summer heat dome that set off a chain reaction: early drought, drier forests, and wildfires starting four to five weeks earlier than usual.
“You end up doing briefings day after day after day,” he said. “People are being evacuated, infrastructure trying to be saved. It's all hands on deck.”