Virtually every snowflake that falls on Fortress Mountain in the Kananaskis area is recorded and observed.
“We’re in a time where we have extreme weather and a changing climate,” said John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Center for Hydrology. “We try to follow every drop of water, every snow and see where it goes.”
The Center for Hydrology’s Coldwater Laboratory consists of instrument stations placed on ridges, glaciers, valleys and streams in the Alberta Rockies.
The collected data and aggregated numbers form new and more reliable climate prediction models for forecasting floods, droughts and water supplies. Today they are based on physics instead of historical observations.
That information is becoming increasingly important, Pomeroy said, as a changing climate alters the norm in the mountains.
The formulas they develop are complex but have proven to be robust, he said.
“If you have a model that’s based on physics, you can throw at it a weather model or climate conditions that we’ve never seen and the laws of physics still apply,” Pomeroy said.
Pomeroy checks the lab’s stations while some of us scroll through Twitter. In the morning, the first thing he wants to know is what’s going on at Bonsai or Fortress Ledge or Canadian Ridge.
The bones of this former ski hill, Pomeroy said, make the perfect partnership for climate research. Key personnel are still working at the fort, taking care of avalanche control and maintaining the road leading to the old lodge.
Fortress Mountain is a great place for researchers to collect important data. (Helen Pike/CBC)
Without those two things, Pomeroy said, researchers wouldn’t be able to get to their stations where various experiments are being conducted.
Taking care of these stations is hard work, done by people like research technician Kieran Lehane, who says his main role is managing 35 hydrometric stations — not just on Fortress Mountain, but also in other parts of Kananaskis and the Icefields Parkway.
“I take care of all these little robot babies, all the sensors and data loggers,” Lehane said.
Figuring out how to keep stations and sensors working in some harsh and sub-zero temperatures is often a tough job.
“When you have so many stations and so many sensors … things just get confusing, especially in the winter,” Lehane said. “I don’t miss work.”
John Pomeroy is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Saskatchewan. He is also director of the Coldwater Laboratory, Canmore, Alta. (Helen Pike/CBC)
A day checking out all the Fortress stations means hopping on a Skidoo with a sled, a packed lunch from home, and some snowshoes in case of deep snow.
There is a lot of ground to cover and often the work is windy and cold. If temperatures drop low enough, the batteries on some of the stations need to be replaced. And it’s a heavy load: a camping cooler full of car batteries must be dragged to the site and buried in deep snow as a backup if wind and solar fail.
Data is not only collected from the ground.
Madison Harasin, who is a research technician, pilots drones equipped with a variety of sensors, including a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor.
“We are doing snow surveys at different places in the fort basin just to check the depth and density of the snow in those areas,” Harasin said.
“It’s basically like taking a million samples of the snow depth above the fort pool in one day, instead of going and doing it yourself and then breaking up the snow while physically measuring it.”
John Pomeroy, Kieran Lehane and Maddison Harasin load snowshoes and other provisions for a day on Fortress Mountain. (Helen Pike/CBC)
At each Pomeroy station, there is a complete list of ongoing experiments and research related to the equipment you see around you and discoveries made by Center for Hydrology researchers and experts from other institutions here.
“It was a really good site to collaborate on,” he said.
Discoveries like how the tree line in Kananaskis creeps up the Alps. Trees hold the snow in place, but the snow that covers the treetops and is caught in the branches often evaporates into the atmosphere—never trickles down streams as meltwater.
And to observe this, you will find a tree in the forest that is unlike any other. It has been cut from its roots and is suspended in the air by some kind of metal scaffolding, a pulley and some wire.
University of Saskatchewan research technician Kieran Lehane, left, and Coldwater Lab director John Pomeroy check one of the 35 hydrometric stations maintained by the group. (Helen Pike/CBC)
Lehan climbed the system last fall by harnessing the tower. Pointing cameras in different directions so the site can be monitored from a distance – he said this helps in case something funny happens to the data.
The tree is weighed at 15-minute intervals and nearby horse watering troughs capture the snow blown from the treetops, including this measurement.
“The amount that unloads is the amount of water vapor that leaves that area through evaporation and then the accumulation of snow on the ground,” Pomeroy said. “It’s kind of a snow ecosystem here.”
As part of the so-called Canadian Rockies Hydrological Observatory, these stations collect near-real-time data that the public can view on the Center for Hydrology website. (Helen Pike/CBC)
He said they learned how avalanches carry snow to lower elevations, where nice, slow-melting reservoirs are created.
One lake he was sure to point out, the water pool is empty in the winter—in the spring, he said, it’s full of water that’s not fed by a stream, but by groundwater stored inside the mountain.
All of these findings mean more understanding and more data to feed into the complex formulas that the Coldwater lab develops to create forecasting models and shares openly with governments here in Canada and around the world.
With new technologies, such as supercomputers, he said scientists are now able to quickly run complex calculations.
“There’s going to be more flooding in the future and hopefully we’ll be able to predict it better than we have in the past and that’s my hope,” Pomeroy said.
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