Centre for Hydrology

John Pomeroy: We are sitting here by the Columbia Icefield, which is one of the largest mountain ice fields in the world, the Saskatchewan glacier which comes off it is one of the headwaters of the saskatchewan river system. The goals we have for the research here are to better understand the interactions between the atmosphere, the glacier surface, the seasonal snow cover, and the glacier snow cover. The glaciers are some of the best indicators of climate change that is occurring. We have lost between 25 and 35 percent of the glacial area in the last quarter century of the 20th century and it has continued to accelerate. This is not only happening here, but around the world. Our particular interest from the university is advancing the science and a particular need that we're trying to fill is improving models of glacier hydrology and glacier interactions with the atmosphere. What we're installing here by the Athabasca glacier is not just a regular weather station, though even that would be special in this environment because there are no weather stations around here. Of course we're measuring wind speed, temperature, and humidity, but we're also measuring soil moisture, soil temperature, snow depth, snowfall, rainfall, incoming and outgoing solar radiation, and thermal infrared radiation, and those types of measurements allow us to calculate the energy balance for snow melt and ice melt. We will also be putting one of the University of Saskatchewan's inventions out here. It's a system for acoustic sounding of snow, developed by Dr Nicholas Kinar, and it sends a sound wave into the snowpack right down to the base of the snow pack and then back out. We can figure out the density of the snow, the depth of the snow, the wetness of the snow, the temperature of the snow, and some of the layering in the snowpack. We're also going to be putting stations up on the glacier, and those we have to drill into the ice. We've got to go very, very deep with the pole because you can easily get five meters of ice melt in a year, and that exposes the pole, so the poles are in sections, and you have to take off the top section and lower all the instruments down and down to keep it moving down with the glacier as it melts. Also in this area we'll be flying a drone, which will have thermal infrared measurements, near-infrared measurements, and visible measurements to give us the snow covered area. We'll be able to develop a three-dimensional image of the glacier so we can then map out the glacier change over time. Also, by next summer we should have eddie correlation, a way of directly measuring turbulence in the atmosphere, and by calculating the turbulence over the glacier versus the turbulence off glacier, we can figure out how quickly it's melting and also how that glacier is cooling off this whole environment around here as it slows down its own melt.

We're at fortress mountains snow lab which is put in by the University of Saskatchewan over the last two years. We're up here over 2,000 meters in elevation in one of the most consistently snowy places in the Canadian Rockies. We filled it with instrumentation to measure blowing snow, snow intercepted in the forest canopy, snow melt rates, and how the snowpack then melts and fills lakes, forms streams, and fills groundwater in this area. So it's been a wonderful lab for us. The reason we call it a lab is because it has roads going up to high elevation in here, and is gated off from the public. So it's a really good place to do high intensity research with excellent logistics.

At this site we have graduate students who are training at the Ph.D. level and Masters level, and this site is one that they [compare information from other sites and instruments to that from] the Bologna Icefield in the Northwest Territories, and on Peyto Glacier further south in Banff National Park. As we collect several more years of data, these datasets become available for more students to come in:

Dhiraj Pradhananga: I realized that I really need to do my PhD with a very renowned scientist, John Pomeroy, who is a pioneer in this this field. Now I'm trying to see how local climate influenced glacial advancing and retreating and how it is influencing the water availability downstream. I'm trying to connect the signs and development and technology that has been developed over here and apply it in other parts of the world.

Jonathan Conway: There's still a lot we don't know about the interaction of the large-scale climate with the [local] climate that actually affects the glacial melts and accumulation, and so my interest is in the boundary layer and what is driving glacier melt and accumulation.

John Pomeroy: It's worthwhile to study glaciers because they're an essential feature of the Canadian environment. Glacier melt will eventually contribute to waters that are used for irrigation, for hydro electricity production, and urban water consumption, so the water is very important. And because glaciers melt fastest during the hottest, driest summers, this provides a little bit of drought proofing for the prairies, and that's an advantage that most other agricultural regions in the world don't have. The changing glacier cover, the changing climate associated with that, and the changing snow packs in the high mountains around the glaciers, are all critically important to our future streamflow, and this is one of the major areas of research in the Global Institute for Water Security, and one that we are intensely dealing with at this site.