Biography|Elizabeth Dowdeswell — The Downsview Weather Block She Took as Assistant Deputy Minister

People remember Elizabeth Dowdeswell as a UN official who arrived fully formed in Nairobi.

The weather service that trained her for that job still sits on Dufferin Street in Toronto's north end.

Canada's meteorological headquarters left 315 Bloor Street West in 1971 and 1972 and moved into 4905 Dufferin Street, Downsview.

In 1971 the service itself was renamed the Atmospheric Environment Service.

It remains a working Environment and Climate Change Canada site: storm prediction, atmospheric monitoring, and a roof instrument array that NASA's AERONET list still records at about 43.7814 north, 79.4688 west.

Dowdeswell reached Ottawa in 1982, first at Treasury Board, then at Environment Canada.

A University of Saskatchewan honorary citation from 1994 records that she directed the department's Ontario office before becoming assistant deputy minister of the Atmospheric Environment Service.

SourceWatch, drawing on her later public biographies, dates that ADM post from 1989 to 1992.

In that chair she was responsible for the national weather and atmospheric agency.

The same biographies record her as Canada's permanent representative to the World Meteorological Organization and as a principal delegate to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio she worked on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The Governor General's Order of Canada citation later named that treaty work among the reasons for the honour.

Ozone Watch and the UV-B Index were public services built in those years.

The Dufferin block is not a museum.

It is still the forecast factory behind the maps Canadians read in a storm.

Photo: LGOntario, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons