By Courtney Markewich

Environment Canada trying to make Twitter weather updates work

Feb 8, 2015 | 8:14 AM

Environment Canada has a lot of kinks to work out before it can begin tweeting weather warnings.

The weather service has been working on utilizing the social-media site for some time now, but has had a number of issues to work through to make Twitter work with its weather updates.

“We knew we were trying to do something that hadn’t been done before,” said Ken MacDonald, executive director for national programming and business development.

“It’s something that the system was not set up for, really.”

In August 2014, Environment Canada explained two main issues that had to be sorted out to start tweeting weather alerts: setting up enough accounts, and being allowed to tweet an unlimited amount of messages. 

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“Twitter is quite a sophisticated system,” explained MacDonald in January 2015. “They have a number of checks within the system to protect themselves and protect users from spam and mass mailings. And each time we think we have an approach set up to establish our accounts and to tweet our volumes, some other little ‘gotchya’ arises.”

MacDonald says Twitter’s engineers have helped Environment Canada work through these issues. Newer challenges include making sure enough information is included in the tweets within a limit of 140 characters.

“Because the tweet has so few characters, the tweet won’t contain the details of the weather warning. It will simply say, ‘a tornado warning has been issued for your area,’ it will have a hashtag and a link to our website where the details can be found.”

A test has been set up for 21 cities, which includes an account in both English and French. MacDonald said a few issues have been found with those 42 accounts when it comes to the wording and formatting of the tweets.

MacDonald says the hope is that additional accounts can now be set up to have all 834 cities online by sometime this summer.

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