Canadian Radar Data
Canadian radar data are received at NCEP via an agreement with Environment Canada. Under the terms of the agreement, the data in raw numerical form has commercial value to Environment Canada and may not be redistributed at any time to anyone outside of the U.S. government. In particular, it may not be redistributed to any educational institution, research group, foreign agency, or anyone in the general public.
However, NCEP or any other U.S. government agency may generate derivative products from the data, including composite radar charts, nowcasting products, etc., and these may be freely distributed to the general public without restriction so long as they do not contain any raw observational values. In such cases, attribution should be provided with the derived product to indicate that the original radar data was provided courtesy of Environment Canada.
Canadian radar data are stored in the NCEP observational database as BUFR type/subtypes b006/xx080, xx081, ..., xx103, xx110, xx111, ..., xx133.
Canadian rada data may not be redistributed in raw numerical form to anyone outside of the U.S. government. There is no expiration on this restriction.
Users of this data may redistribute it in its raw form only to recipients within agencies of the U.S. government. Before doing so, the user must complete the "inform and acknowledge" procedure with the intended recipient as described on the previous page. A template is provided for this purpose which may be cut-and-pasted into an e-mail from the user to the intended recipient. Once the reply acknowledgement is received from the recipient, the user should then forward a copy of this acknowledgement to ncep.nco.ccsdata@noaa.gov before making the redistribution.
Users who generate derived products (e.g. images, radar charts) from this data may redistribute those products without restriction to the general public. However, such products must not contain any raw numerical data values, and the attribution "Canadian radar data was provided courtesy of Environment Canada" must be included or footnoted within the product.
