Know the heat before it knows your athletes.
Real-time and research-grade Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) monitoring for sport, built by the clinicians and researchers who use it on the field.
Heat stress is one of the most preventable causes of serious injury and death in sport — and one of the least consistently monitored. Most Canadian sport organizations still rely on air temperature or humidex, neither of which captures the radiant heat load athletes actually experience on a field, court, or track. WBGT does. It's the standard used by the American College of Sports Medicine, the U.S. military, and elite sport federations worldwide — but it's rarely accessible, affordable, or well understood at the community and scholastic level in Canada.
sportweather.org exists to close that gap.
Live WBGT Monitoring Minute-by-minute WBGT surveillance built on validated Kestrel heat-stress instrumentation, giving coaches, athletic therapists, and event medical teams the same data quality used in elite and military settings — without the elite-sport price tag.
Applied Research An active research program investigating the frequency and distribution of dangerous WBGT conditions across Southern Ontario, the validity of low-cost heat-stress monitors against reference-grade instruments, and how far a single community weather station's readings can reasonably extend across a venue or region — work that's directly shaping heat policy conversations in Canadian sport.
Event Medical Deployment Field-tested at scale: multi-site WBGT surveillance deployed across major multi-sport events, including full logger networks spanning multiple venues, feeding real-time heat-stress data directly into medical operations planning and activity-modification decisions on the day.
Heat-related illness is largely preventable when you have the right data at the right time. A single WBGT reading can tell a coach when to add a water break, an athletic therapist when to flag a venue, or a medical operations team when to consider adjusting the schedule — before an athlete is in trouble, not after.
sportweather.org is led by Dr. Michael Robinson, PhD, CAT(C), ATC, a faculty member in the Faculty of Health at York University, where his work spans athletic therapy education and applied heat-stress research. He also serves in medical operations leadership for major multi-sport events across Ontario, and consults on sport safety and risk through Sport Risk Intelligence Inc.
His research combines field deployment, instrumentation validation, and statistical methods to answer a deceptively simple question: is it safe to play right now — and how do we know?