Challenges of Changing Climates with Special Reference to Kitchener-Waterloo and the Grand River Basin‪.‬

The climate of an area is probably its most important natural resource, or aspect of its heritage, since it determines, among other things, the flow in the rivers, the crops that can be grown, and the cost of heating or cooling buildings. The Kitchener-Waterloo area, at 43[degrees] north latitude, midway between the equator and the north pole, has long days in summer (15 hours and 26 minutes on June 21st) and short days in winter (8 hours and 56 minutes on December 21st). This fact, plus the position of the area in the middle of the continent, in the zone of westerly winds, helps to explain the climate. The climatic facts of temperature and precipitation (rain and snow) are expressed by numbers, and the length of record of these numbers is rather short. The problem of measuring the temperature of the air was not solved until the eighteenth century in Europe, with the invention of the thermometer by scientists such as Fahrenheit (1714) and Celsius (1742). The longest records of temperature and precipitation in Canada are for Toronto, where continuous measurement began in 1840. Some 2,500 climate stations are now operating in Canada. About 200 are airport stations. The remainder are manned by volunteer observers who record temperature, rain, and snow twice daily and send the data to Environment Canada. In the Kitchener-Waterloo area, the first weather observations were taken in 1915 in downtown Kitchener by a volunteer observer. This station continued until the 1970s when the weather office at the Waterloo-Wellington Airport station in Breslau was opened.