How a former ski hill in southern Alberta has become an important key to climate study | 24CA News

Virtually each snowflake that falls on Fortress Mountain within the Kananaskis area is recorded and watched.

“We’re in a time when we get extreme weather and a changing climate,” stated John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology.  “We try to follow every drop of water, every flake of snow, and see where it’s going.”

The Centre for Hydrology’s Coldwater laboratory is made up of stations with devices positioned on the ridges, glaciers, valleys, and creeks within the Alberta Rockies. 

Data collected, and numbers crunched, are forming new and extra dependable local weather prediction fashions for flood, drought, and water provide forecasting. Nowadays they’re primarily based on physics as a substitute of historic observations. 

This data is changing into more and more necessary, Pomeroy stated, as a altering local weather modifications the norm within the mountains.

The formulation they develop are advanced, however have confirmed to be sturdy, he stated. 

“If you have a model that’s based on physics, you can throw at it a weather pattern or a climatic condition that we’ve never seen and the laws of physics still hold,” Pomeroy stated. 

Pomeroy checks in on the lab’s stations as a lot as a few of us scroll by Twitter. In the morning, the very first thing he desires to know is what’s occurring at Bonsai or Fortress Ledge or Canadian Ridge. 

The bones of this former ski hill, Pomeroy stated, make the right partnership for local weather analysis. Key workers nonetheless work on Fortress, caring for avalanche management and sustaining the highway resulting in the previous day lodge. 

Without these two issues, Pomeroy stated researchers would not be capable of make it as much as their stations that host varied experiments. 

Taking care of those stations is difficult work performed by folks like analysis technician Kieran Lehan, who says his major position is managing 35 hydrometric stations – not simply on Fortress Mountain, however in different elements of Kananaskis, and the Icefields Parkway.

“Taking care of all of these little robot babies, all of the sensors and the data loggers,” Lehan stated.

It’s usually a tricky job of determining learn how to hold stations and sensors operating by some rugged and freezing temperatures. 

“When you have this many stations and this many sensors …things just go wrong, especially in the winter,” Lehan stated. “I have no shortage of work.”

A day of testing all the stations on Fortress means hopping on a Skidoo with a sled, a bagged lunch from residence, and a few snowshoes in case of deep snow. 

There’s loads of floor to cowl, and sometimes it is a windy and chilly job. If temperatures dip low sufficient, batteries at a number of the stations should be swapped out. And that is a heavy raise: a tenting cooler stuffed with automotive batteries must be dragged to the location and buried in deep snow as a backup if wind and solar energy fail.

Data is not simply collected from the bottom. Harasyn pilots drones geared up with varied sensors, together with a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor.

“We do take snow surveys over different locations in the Fortress Basin just to verify snow depth and density in those areas,” Harasyn stated.

“It’s basically like taking a million samples of snow depth over the fortress basin in one day versus, you know, going and doing it yourself and then disrupting the snow as well while physically measuring it.”

At each station, Pomeroy has a laundry listing of ongoing experiments and analysis tied to the gear you see round you, and discoveries researchers with the Centre for Hydrology and consultants from different establishments have made right here.

“It’s been a really good collaboration site,” he stated.

Discoveries like how the tree line in Kananaskis is creeping up the Alpine. Trees maintain snow in place however the snow that shrouds the tops of bushes and is caught in branches usually evaporates into the ambiance — by no means making it down the streams as meltwater. 

And to observe that you will discover a tree within the forest that is not like others. It has been chopped from its roots and suspended within the air by some steel scaffolding, a pulley, and a few wire. 

Lehan climbed up the system final fall by climbing the tower with a harness on. Pointing cameras in varied instructions in order that the location could be watched remotely — he stated this helps in case there’s one thing humorous occurring with the info.

The tree is weighted at 15-minute intervals and close by horse watering troughs catch the snow that is blown from tree tops, incorporating that measurement as effectively. 

“The amount that unloads the amount of water vapour that leaves this area by evaporation and then the accumulation of snow on the ground,” Pomeroy stated. “It’s kind of a snowy ecosystem up here.” 

He stated they’ve discovered how avalanches transport snow into decrease elevations the place good, slow-melting reservoirs are created. 

One lake he is certain to level out, a water basin is empty in winter — within the spring, he stated, it is stuffed with water that is not fed by a stream, however from groundwater saved within the mountain.

All of those discoveries imply extra understanding, and extra knowledge to plug into the advanced formulation the Coldwater lab develops to create forecasting fashions and shares brazenly with governments right here in Canada and the world over.

With new expertise, like supercomputers, he stated scientists are actually in a position to handle advanced calculations rapidly. 

“There will be more floods in the future and hopefully we’ll be able to predict them better than we have in the past and that’s that that’s my hope,” Pomeroy stated.