CFS Alert - Weather Station

Weather Station

Alert (then part of the Northwest Territories) was first inhabited by employees of the Canadian Department of Transport and the United States Weather Bureau in 1950 when the Joint Arctic Weather Station (JAWS) was established. An airfield and small building were built to service various weather monitoring equipment.

This weather station remains in operation to this day, however operations were subsequently handed over to employees of the Canadian Department of the Environment via the Meteorological Service of Canada.

In April 1971 a party of federal and NWT government officials were in Alert trying to reach the North Pole. The Alert Station had been the embarkation points for many North Pole expeditions that relied on weather information supplied by JAWS. The 1971 expedition was led by NWT Commissioner Stuart Hodgson and included in his party were representatives of the Prime Minister's office, the Canadian Armed Forces, the federal Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development as well as a large media group including Pat Carney of Gemini Productions, Ed Ogle of Time Magazine, Val Wake of CBC News and a Californian television crew. While waiting in Alert for a weather window to fly into the Pole the party's television crew spent a lot of time filming at the weather station. The military was not too happy about the film crew working on the station but the JAWS site was seen as being a sort of no-man's land. The Commissioner's party made two attempts to reach the Pole and failed. Some of the incidents surrounding this event are recounted in Val Wake's memoir My Voyage around Spray with Apologies to Captain Joshua Slocum.