Are you kidding?

A few minutes ago I received a Weather Alert from Environment Canada stating in Halifax there were "No watches or warnings in effect." This seemed a little strange to me as the forecast for the past few days has called for thundershowers for yesterday and today (though we didn't get them yesterday). I decided to check the weather warnings page (I was directed there by the aforementioned alert) on the Weather Office site and I found the following image:



What is it Weather Office? Are we subject to a weather warning or not? And in either case why is there so much conflicting information? Also, why do you issue alerts every few hours even when you have nothing to report?

I don't know why I even bother checking Weather Office forecasts anymore, they seem to be wrong more often than they are right.

Update: Apparently a Weather Alert has now been formally issued for the Halifax region, though it took almost two hours for the news to make its way from Environment Canada to my computer.

More bad news on the Swine Flu front

It seems that CBC is now reporting that another 4 cases of Swine Flu have been confirmed in Nova Scotia. Not surprisingly it seems that these are related to the original four cases.

I was just beginning to think that maybe Nova Scotia would luck out and the outbreak would be limited to the original four cases, but I guess this was not to be. Hopefully the early knowledge and subsequent precautions will allow this second outbreak to be contained. Now that I think about it, I don't really know when it is that people with Swine Flu are contagious.

On a related note, Mary (through somewhat passive means) brought my attention to this map, which seems to show reported instances of Swine Flu. If I get around to it later today it would be neat to find an equivalent map from the WHO, or a similar body.