Dave Sullivan
Northern News Services

Fort Smith (Mar 18/02) - Where the wind blows, nobody knows.

That's be-cause the government hasn't studied it yet.

OK, that's not entirely true. Environment Canada has been taking wind measurements for decades, just ask Mike Dollman. He releases a weather balloon twice daily over Fort Smith. His balloons join 900 around the globe that are all released at the same time to measure average wind speed, direction, temperature and humidity. All readings are fed into computers.

The South Slave Re-search Centre, an arm of Aurora College, has just begun a closer look at the North for places breezy enough wind for commercial windmill potential.

The centre's Ruthann Gal says the $8,000 study for the territorial government will look for places like valleys that channel wind into faster speeds.

There's some irony that the base for the new examination of wind should be Fort Smith. The town has no wind. Well, hardly any.

Yes, in a part of Canada where you can feel the Arctic wind's bite just by thinking about it, Fort Smith has a little secret. When thermometers say it's - 20 C, that's exactly what it often is, not - 40 with the wind-chill factor casually tossed in. As though the extra 20 or so degrees of cold don't really count.

Wind patterns are extremely local, explains Environment Canada meteorologist Jesse Jasper. They're determined almost exclusively by topography --the shape of the land.

Part of Jasper's work involves how climate change may impact wind patterns.

Trees and water bodies are a landscape's most important feature determining if a Northern town gets a lot of wind, says Environment Canada's Yvonne Bilan-Wallace.

"If you chop down all the trees around Fort Smith you can make a lot more wind there," Bilan-Wallace suggests. Great idea.

For 22 years now she's been forecasting NWT and Nunavut weather from Edmonton.

Bilan-Wallace points out a chicken-and-egg thing about the North's truly crazy treeline, which makes vast zig-zags across the landscape.

"Does the wind not allow the trees to grow or were the trees already there to stop the wind."

Hmmmm.