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TOC > MSC data > Marine weather > Marine weather on MSC Datamart

Data of the marine weather forecasts

This page describes the data of the marine weather forecasts available on the MSC Datamart.

The XML files contain the weather forecast, marine weather warnings (warning and watch), ice alerts and the end of season announcement. They are updated two to four times a day, or more often in the case of amendments, marine weather warnings (alert or watch) or ice warnings.

The Environment and Climate Change Canada's guide to the marine forecast includes information on the issuing time of forecasts, time period covered by forecast, determination of forecast regions, forecast time period terminology, information included in the forecast, and forecast revision.

Notes:

Data location

MSC Datamart data can be automatically retrieved with the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) as soon as they become available. An overview and examples to access and use the Meteorological Service of Canada's open data is also available.

The data is available via the HTTPS protocol. It is possible to access it with a standard browser. In this case, we obtain a list of links giving access to a XML file.

  • Marine weather XML forecasts, disseminated in dated files (single files) are available according to this hierarchy :

https://dd.weather.gc.ca/marine_weather/{DOMAIN}/{HH}

where:

* __DOMAIN__ : Name of the region covered by the forecast
* __HH__ : Hour (UTC) of forecast data emission

The domain is one of the 8 following values :

  • arctic
  • atlantic
  • great_lakes
  • hudson
  • mackenzie
  • pacific
  • prairies

  • st_lawrence

  • Marine weather XML forecasts, distributed in undated files (data overwritten with each update) are available at this address:

https://dd.weather.gc.ca/marine_weather/xml/{DOMAIN}

where:

* __DOMAIN__ : Name of the region covered by the forecast (see the list above)

Tables describing each of the marine weather XML element tags and their associated attributes are available.

The XML schemas for marine weather data are found in this directory :

https://dd.weather.gc.ca/marine_weather/schema/

File name nomenclature

The file names have the following nomenclature :

  • Dated, unique files:

{YYYYMMDD}T{HHmmss.sss}Z_MSC_MarineWeather_{SiteCode}_{L}.xml

where :

* __SiteCode__ : Marine region code (see below)
* __L__ : Letter indicating file language: fr (French) or en (English)

Examples of file names:

* 20250219T070026.074Z_MSC_MarineWeather_m0000109_en.xml
* 20250219T070026.074Z_MSC_MarineWeather_m0000109_fr.xml
  • Undated files, overwritten with each update:

{SiteCode}_{L}.xml

where :

* __SiteCode__ : Marine region code (see below)
* __L__ : Letter indicating file language: f (French) or e (English)

Examples of file names:

* s0000011_e.xml 
* s0000011_f.xml

A list with location names and RegionNameCodes is available.

NOTE: Unique dated files should replace undated files within the next few months, in order to avoid any file corruption issues.

Support

If you have any questions about this data, please contact us.

Announcements from the dd_info mailing list

Announcements related to this dataset are available in the dd_info list.