The Photo Michael Newark and Librarian, Lilita Stripnieks |
The Story
The photo at left was originally published
in the May / June 1984 edition of Zephyr.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
The AES Downsview library has received a unique donation, of great practical value to meteorologists and researchers. It is a detailed record of Canadian tornadoes over a period of more than 200 years. The donor is Mike Newark, currently head of the Building and Construction Research Unit of the AES Canadian Climate Centre, and formerly a supervising meteorologist at the Ontario Weather Centre, who, from 1980 to 1982, specialized in severe summer storms. The complete story may be read in pdf form by clicking here. * * *
Seven years earlier, in 1977, Michael Newark wrote a letter to the editor of Zephyr which stated that Canada had little knowledge about tornadoes, pointing out that they "seemed" to occur south of the Canada / USA border, but not much in Canada. This letter was the spark which started Michael's study and project about tornadoes which had been reported in old Canadian newspapers. Without the digital searching resources available now, this was a labour-intensive study, completed in his spare time away from weather office shiftwork. You can find out about the full background and origin of this project by reading Michael's letter at this pdf location. Finally, Michael Newark founded the popular meteorological magazine Chinook which has been digitized here. It was published from 1978 to 1989. The three paragraphs above were written in August 2023 by Bob Jones, Archivist. |
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