Environment Canada

The Environment Canada integration provides meteorological data for Canadian locations from Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Configuration

Adding Environment Canada to your Home Assistant instance can be done via the user interface, by using this My button:

Location Selection

The integration automatically determines the closest weather station based on the latitude and longitude specified. If integration-specific coordinates are not provided, the coordinates configured for Home Assistant are used.

You can also specify a weather station to use by providing a identification code of the form AB/s0000123, based on those listed in this CSV file.

Entities

The integration will create the entities listed below. Some of the entities are disabled by default and can be enabled via the integration’s Entities page.

Weather

• Current conditions and daily forecast
• Current conditions and hourly forecast (disabled by default)

Camera

• Loop of radar imagery from the last 3 hours (disabled by default). Also, by default this entity uses the radar rain layer from 1 April to 30 November and the snow layer from 1 December to 31 March. The rain/snow layer can be changed using the service described below.

Sensors

Conditions and Forecasts

• Current condition
• Forecast summary
• Icon code of current condition
• Barometric pressure
• Pressure tendency
• Humidity
• Visibility
• UV index
• Air Quality (AQHI)

Temperature

• Temperature
• Forecast high temperature
• Forecast low temperature
• Dewpoint
• Wind chill (only at temperatures below 0ºC)
• Humidex (only at temperatures above 19ºC)

Wind

• Wind speed
• Wind gust
• Wind direction
• Wind bearing

Precipitation

• Probability of precipitation
• Precipitation yesterday

Alerts

• Warnings
• Watches
• Advisories
• Statements
• Endings

The alert sensors use the number of current alerts as their state, with an attribute containing the title of each alert.

Solving Problems

The Environment Canada service is very stable and provides high-quality data. Here are some steps that you can take before opening a problem report or posting on the forum.

Service Interruptions

Although infrequent, there have been some outages and instabilities of the Environment Canada service. If you see error messages in your logs similar to the one below, it is very unlikely to be a problem with this integration and is likely a problem with the Environment Canada service.

2022-10-05 12:25:08.619 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.environment_canada] Timeout fetching environment_canada weather data

The first course of action should be to check if there are known problems with the service. Look for recent messages on the Environment Canada mailing list (example message). The next course of action is to post on the forum. The answers are usually already known by someone.

Sensor unavailable or unknown

Not all weather stations provide a complete set of weather/sensor data. The data that is retrieved by this integration can be found here. Browsing the XML data for your station will help you to understand what data is (un)available.

Template Sensors

The configuration snippet below adds a useful template sensors showing the current “feels like” temperature among air temperature, humidex, and wind chill.

Replace NAME with the name used to configure your integration.

template:
  - sensor:
    - name: "Feels Like"
      device_class: temperature
      unit_of_measurement: "°C"
      state: >
        {% if not is_state('sensor.NAME_humidex', 'unknown') %}
          {{ states('sensor.NAME_humidex') }}
        {% elif not is_state('sensor.NAME_wind_chill', 'unknown') %}
          {{ states('sensor.NAME_wind_chill') }}
        {% else %}
          {{ states('sensor.NAME_temperature') | round(0) }}
        {% endif %}

Services

Service environment_canada.set_radar_type

Sets the type of radar to retrieve for the camera.