About This Website This website provides a further channel of communication with trail users in addition to the annual newsletter and email. Besides general news and information on donating time and money to support these trails, the main concept behind the website is a message of responsible use and awareness of trail impact.

Message BoardPlease use the message board for posting updates on trail or snow conditions that may benefit other users. During the winter, you can use the popup menu to enter a depth measurement from the Kolapore snow gauge, if you happen to see it; otherwise leave the default value of "n/m" for no measurement. The depth, if reported, will show up in the table on the Snow page under Kolapore.

The message board is implemented through email rather than the Yahoo servers so as to avoid monthly Yahoo fees and Yahoo popup ads. As a result, it takes one to two minutes for the message to propagate from geocities, to my computer, and back to geocities again as a posted update. If your message does not eventually appear, then try reposting or contact the website feedback.

Weather Data Since there is no one onsite at Kolapore to take phone calls and give out trail conditions, this website is the next best solution.

There are an increasing number of weather data sources on the internet with every passing year, with product in both tabular and map form. One can use these data to make a reasonable assessment of conditions on the ground. However, the accuracy of the various data, particularly in mapped form, can be harder to determine. It only takes a comparison of two such maps purportedly showing the same quantity to realize that in fact the data often diverge more than they agree. The problem is that no one website contains side-by-side data from independent sources. Furthermore, one cannot reasonably skip from website to website attempting to compare, due to the confounding presence of ads, popup windows, and other useless graphics that kill bandwidth.

Therefore, this website deploys scripts to continuously retrieve and filter data from independent sources, at the same rate that they are updated on the source websites, for comparison purposes. Each graphic has a timestamp, which is given in one of several time standards: Eastern Daylight time, Greenwich mean time (GMT), co-ordinated universal time (UTC) or Zulu time (Z). UTC, GMT and Z time are all equivalent while Eastern standard time in Ontario lags them by four hours.

By studying this weather information for just a few minutes on the morning of your trip, you can determine what the trail conditions are likely to be and whether or not it may be best to postpone your day trip to wait for better conditions. For example, during the spring, summer and fall please avoid using the trails after significant rainfall as they are more susceptible to erosion and deterioration when wet.

The goal of this website is to present precipitation data in three categories: recent accumulation, current observations, and forecast. Of these three, accumulation reports are the most valuable but the hardest to find. The weather data are culled from several sources as follows:

• Radar: Environment Canada's radars at King City and Britt provide loops of recent observations taken at 10 minute intervals. The units are cm/hr of liquid precipitation, or liquid equivalent of snow during winter. Unfortunately, there is as yet no 24 hour accumulation product. NEXRAD and possibly other radars in New York, Ohio and Michigan provide some overlap coverage into southern Ontario, and there are three 24 hour accumulation products available based on American radar data: AccuWeather, Ham Weather, and Intellicast. Kolapore seems to lie right at the edge of the Accuweather radars, and it is not certain whether the other two products provide better coverage or not.
• Surface Observations: Weather Network catalogues precipitation accumulation on a daily basis for Ontario farmers. Unfortunately, there are only two observation points for this area of southwestern Ontario at Mount Forest and Wiarton. While local data were actually collected by EC at Ravenna for a few years in the 1940's and 1950's, the best hope for the future is amateur weather stations such as John Mott's in Kimberley (Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 Plus). An Oregon Scientific WMR968 station in Owen Sound and a Peet Ultimeter 2100 in Stayner are now also online. If two or three of these stations are showing significant accumulation for the day, then you can safely assume some precipitation has occurred over Kolapore. The notation "-" indicates that no datum was available on that day.
• Satellite: The geostationary (GOES-12) satellite operated by NOAA provides greyscale imagery in the visible spectrum twice per hour during the day. The resolution is 1 km per pixel, which means that lake effect streamers should be seen during the winter. A new rainfall accumulation product derived from GOES infra-red spectra is also available. The resolution is quite coarse and the presented image has been interpolated three-fold.
• Forecast: This is the short-term forecast provided by Environment Canada three times per day at 0500, 1100, 1530. Most frequently, this forecast applies to all of Grey and Bruce counties, but sometimes it is more specific to Grey county; in any event, what is quoted here is always the most specific part of the forecast. AccuWeather provides a forecast of 24 hour rainfall accumulation in map form; note that during the winter this map continues to show rainfall predictions but does not show a snowfall prediction.
• Snow: The data on the snow page are divided into present snowpack, past 24 hour accumulation, and forecast.
  • Ontario snow depth maps are available from Weather Underground, Weather Network and Environment Canada, updated most days during the winter months. The Environment Canada map is a contour map, labelled in centimetres. I am not sure about the resolution of these maps, but the Weather Underground data are attributed to the US Air Force at a nominal resolution of 47 km per pixel, and for the Environment Canada map there are just 39 weather stations contributing data for the whole province of Ontario. Estimates of snow coverage are available at much better resolution, though without any depth information. NOAA collects high-resolution (250 m per pixel) MODIS colour imagery in the visible band from the NASA/Canada/Japan Terra satellite once per day. On a clear day, this should provide a good look at snow cover in the Georgian Bay region. The NOAA further provides snow cover mapping at 4 km resolution based on a combination of the GOES visible data and infrared data from the AVHRR instrumentation. This product is inset at the top left of the MODIS image.

  • During the winter months, daily snowfall reports from seven local resorts in the Kolapore area are scraped and tabulated. In the case of Scenic Caves, Duntroon and Wasaga Beach, the base depth is also tabulated (as the number after the slash) since it presumably does not include the effect of snow-making machinery. If the resort has nothing posted for the day or if the data are not current, "-" is tabulated.

    In addition, a 24 hour accumulation map is now available from NOAA with some overflow coverage into southern Ontario. It is derived from all operationally available ground, airborne, and satellite observations of snow water equivalent, snow depth, and snow cover with a claimed resolution of 1 km per pixel (hard to believe). Note that this map shows the liquid equivalent of the snowfall. The actual depth of the snow would generally be about 10 times higher than the liquid equivalent. In the case of rain, it does not show anything.

  • A forecast map of snowfall over the next 12 hours is available from Intellicast though it doesn't seem very strong on lake effect. A second forecast map of precipitation over the next 24 hours, plotted in contours, is available from NOAA. Note that this latter forecast includes both rain and liquid equivalent of snow, with no demarcation between them, but it does seem to have a lake effect algorithm built into it so right now it's the map to watch. More generally, the NOAA and subsidiary websites have by far the best weather data on the internet, but unfortunately many of their maps are rudely truncated at the international border and so we have to make do with whatever we can get. Lastly, a do-it-yerself forecast for lake effect snow, with the aid of the meteorologist's skew-T chart, is available. The skew-T chart from Unisys at the nearest available sounding station (Gaylord MI) is updated twice per day, and a temperature map of lake Huron from NOAA is also shown.

• Webcams: Positioned in various locations across Grey and Bruce counties, these cameras can give a quick picture of snow flurry activity. The most consistent cams tend to be those at ski resorts with snow-making; others that are potentially more valuable for cross-country skiers relying on natural snowpack are often "here today and gone tomorrow". However, the folks with the Oregon Scientific station in Owen Sound have a great-looking weather camera and have actually put a snow gauge on the image which is cool. An interactive realtime cam in Sauble Beach has recently come online.

Javascript A number of features on the website use Javascript. You may want to enable Javascript in your browser if it is not already so.

Popup Captions on Mouseover I've started adding more descriptive popup captions on mouseover event for the various graphics. Some Firefox browsers may not display the full caption. Install the Firefox Long Title add-on to fix this.

Data Transfer Limit and Ad Blocking There is a monthly download limit of 3 Gb and an hourly download limit of 4.2 Mb for free Yahoo website accounts. That should correspond to the website being viewed, in its entirety, about 8 times per hour or 6000 times per month. If either transfer limit is reached, the weather graphics will not be served for the remainder of that time unit, while the text content should continue to be served.

Geocities popup ads can be quickly blocked by turning off javascript in your browser, but that will also block the javascript content of this site. If you have a Firefox browser, you can easily block just the geocities javascript. Install the Firefox Adblock extension, and view the list of blockable elements in the Kolapore web page. There are 2-3 FRAME items belonging to js_source that should go, and about 2 SCRIPT items. You may have to fiddle with it for a few minutes to get the right elements blocked. Some of the SCRIPT elements are still required to load the actual page content though so don't just block everything.