Insurance and fire investigators will now be able to use The Weather Network’s data archive to authenticate lightning strikes as a possible cause of farm damages, power outages and forest fires.
Oakville, Ont.-based Pelmorex Media, which operates The Weather Network and MeteoMedia, its French-language counterpart, on Wednesday launched an archive of lightning strike data as a new extension of its Pelmorex Lightning Detection Network (PLDN).
The PLDN, in use since 2007, has 71 sensors across Canada and the northern U.S., using GPS to pinpoint the location of lightning strikes across the country.
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Pelmorex sees the service as a “valuable addition” to its offerings for its energy and forestry management customers.
“And it will be just as beneficial to new clients in such fields as insurance and fire investigation,” Bruce Caven, Pelmorex’s vice-president of commercial services, said in a release Wednesday.
According to Environment Canada, Canada sees about 2.7 million lightning flashes each year, which cause over 4,000 forest fires and assorted power outages.
Pelmorex cited a 2009 study that estimates aggregated annual lightning-related damage and disruption costs at somewhere between $600 million and $1 billion, over 85 per cent of which would be in forestry and electricity damages.
About 45 per cent of all forest fires and 81 per cent of total area burned can be blamed on fires caused by lightning, Natural Resources Canada estimates, and suppressing those blazes costs between $500 million to $1 billion each year.
