Professor John Pomeroy has been invited to give a presentation titled Climate Change and Forest Change – The Impacts on our Waters, at the Municipal District of Bighorn’s Living in the Natural Environment event at the Cochrane RancheHouse on Friday 3rd February.

The talk will discuss the rapid changes in mountain snow and glacial regimes occurring in many parts of the world, and how this is already impacting downstream water security. It will also cover aspects of the hydrological management of mountain forests, changes observed in the Bow River Basin, and options for mitigation strategies.

More information about the event is available on the municipal district’s website and from the event poster.

CH members John Pomeroy, Howard Wheater and Bob Sandford have been asked to speak at Climate Extremes – a National Collaboration on Floods and Droughts, a workshop being organised by the Canadian Water Resources Association and Canadian Society for Hydrological Science in partnership with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The workshop aims to explore resources, challenges and opportunities in water management related to flooding and droughts, from both Canadian and international perspectives. It is to take place in Ottawa on Friday 27th January 2017.

Registration details are available here, and a draft agenda (as of 6 December 2016) is posted here.

NASA’s International Snow Working Group – Remote Sensing (iSWGR) will run an intensive course in snow measurement techniques in partnership with CH’s Coldwater Laboratory in Kananaskis Country from 5th to 9th January 2017.

From the official course website –

What:
This three-day intensive field-based course will give fundamental training to students in performing and analyzing snow measurements, including depth, density, snow water equivalence, grain size and shape, stratigraphy, temperature and hardness. Students completing this course will be able to perform high-quality fieldwork as well as design studies requiring snowpack measurements, and upon completion of the course will be capable of performing quality measurements required during snow remote sensing calibration and validation campaigns. Class credit will be offered through the University of Saskatchewan.

Who: Students
The course is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, post-docs, professionals and senior scientists, modelers and those who do snow remote sensing that will either need to make snow measurements as part of their research, or use snowpack data in their research. There are no prerequisites, but students will be selected from the pool of applicants based on applicability to their studies.  Successful applicants will be notified by December 15, 2016. Students from any nation may apply.

Who: Instructors
– Dr Kelly Elder
  US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station
– Dr Matthew Sturm
  Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
– Dr John Pomeroy
  Director, Centre for Hydrology, University of Saskatchewan
– Dr Jessica Lundquist
  Mountain Hydrology Research, University of Washington
– Dr Alexandre Langlois
  Centre d’applications et de recherches en télédétection, Université de Sherbrooke
– Dr Nicholas Kinar
  Centre for Hydrology, University of Saskatchewan

How:
NASA funding is pending (and expected) for the 2017 course. Students will be reimbursed for travel, food, and lodging enroute the Barrier Lake field station, where lodging and meals will be provided. Travel expenses may include airfare, taxi or bus for airport access, and shuttle from Calgary Airport. Car rental will not be reimbursed. Receipts for all the above expenses should be kept and information about processing will be provided at the course. Please make every effort to minimize travel costs. Questions about rates, fees, and reimbursements should be sent to Cindy Brekke at NSIDC.

For course information contact: Dr Matthew Sturm  and indicate Snow School in the subject line.

Full details are available on the course website.

CH director Professor John Pomeroy has been invited to present a seminar to the School of International Development, School of Environmental Sciences and the Water Security Programme at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, England) on Mountains, Climate Change and Water Security.

The Seminar will take place on Thursday 23 June at 1245 pm in Arts 2.02 at UEA Norwich. The seminar will put Canadian and international research on climate change impacts on mountain water resources in the context of global water futures.

More information is available in PDF form.

The Centre for Hydrology and GIWS will be hosting a seminar on Tuesday October 6, at 11am in Geology 165.

Dr Ed Cey, Associate Professor with the Department of Geosciences at the University of Calgary, will present on Searching for Clarity and Connectivity in Hydrologic Processes.

The Centre for Hydrology is hosting a seminar on Thursday, October 1st by
Dr Junfeng Liu, Assistant Professor with the Cold and Arid Regions Engineering Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, China.

Dr Liu will present on Snow and Hydrology Research at the Qilian Ecology and Hydrology Research Station, China, and will summarize recent research on advanced snow observation and modelling in the high mountains of Western China and the Tibetan Plateau.

The seminar will take place at 10 am in 144 Kirk Hall, University of Saskatchewan.

In 2011, CH students (now alumni) Ross Phillips and Nathalie Brunet were members of a team who crossed Canada by bike, foot and (mainly) canoe. Their story is told on the expedition’s website, and now also in a film chronicling their journey: this film will be shown on Saturday 24th January 2015, at the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon (715 Broadway Avenue: doors open at 7:00, show starts at 7:30: Tickets are $5 at the door).

The event’s description follows…

In A Cross Canada Canoe Odyssey join four women, two men, and three canoes as they canoe from the Pacific Ocean, across Canada, to the Atlantic Ocean. The film follows crew members through laughter, illness, frustration, and perseverance as they paddle and portage 7,600 kilometers beneath mountain peaks, across the Great Plains, and through vast expanses of boreal forest.

The trip begins in Vancouver at the mouth of the Fraser River. Through British Columbia’s mountain ranges the crew paddled along mountain lakes andcycled, hiked, and snowshoed through mountain passes with canoes overhead or in tow. The expedition crossed the Rocky Mountain continental divide via the historic Howse Pass. Once over the divide the crew descended into the North Saskatchewan River and across the Great Plains. Throughout the summer months, the Odyssey proceeded east amid record flooding in Manitoba, through small Canadian Shield sheltered lakes separated by countless portages, and past the cliffs and islands the Great Lakes. With the onset of fall, the crew rode the tides of the St. Lawrence, portaged into the St. John River basin, and coasted to the Bay of Fundy.

They overcome gruelling portages, clouds of mosquitoes, food shortages, persistent wind and waves, freighter traffic, poison ivy, and having six independent people being interdependent, continuously for six months. They are quick to delight in the beauty of the scenery surrounding them and the simplicity of travelling with everything needed in their boats for survival and creating a home at every campsite.

The Cross Canada Canoe Odyssey was born out of a love of fresh water and fueled by a lust for adventure. As the Royal Canadian Geographic Society’s 2011 Expedition of the Year, the Odyssey strove to advocate for the importance of freshwater to Canada and partnered with organizations that are working hard to benefit Canadian waterways: the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Canadian Heritage Rivers System.

Experience a fresh view of Canada from the water, an absolutely important aspect of the Canadian environment, heritage and cultural identity.

One of twenty press conferences at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU – 15-19 December in San Francisco, California) focused on CH snowmelt research.

• MSc student Stacey Dumanski is studying increased spring and early summer flooding in the prairies due to changing climate and wetland drainage.
• Dr Danny Marks is a CCRN collaborator studying rain-on-snow melt in the US Pacific NW.
• Prof. John Pomeroy’s presentation discussed the June 2013 rain-on-snow event which contributed to flood generation in the headwaters of the Saskatchewan River Basin in the Canadian Rockies. It was also covered in an article by the Calgary Herald, available in its original form here, and as a PDF here.

The conference is available for online streaming here.

A select group of Centre for Hydrology graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will be presenting previews of their thesis proposals, research findings, and forthcoming AGU talks at a special CH seminar. The full order of battle is available here.

The seminar will be held in 146 Kirk Hall on Wednesday 10^th December in Kirk Hall from 10am-12:30pm (Saskatchewan time).

All invited, feel free to pass on to colleagues that may be interested.

Prof. John Pomeroy will be giving a webinar on The Impact of Wetland Drainage on the Hydrology of a Northern Prairie Watershed to the Association of State Wetland Managers on Monday November 17th at 2 pm Saskatchewan time (1 pm Mountain time).

The talk will detail CH research at Smith Creek, with respect to the hydrological implications of its changing climate and the implications of wetland drainage, as investigated through hydrological model simulations.

If you would like to know more about this research, the webinar will be available at this link.  Thanks are due to co-authors Stacey Dumanski, Logan Fang, Kevin Shook, Cherie Westbrook and Xulin Guo.

Abstract: The Prairie Hydrological Model simulates blowing snow redistribution, snowmelt, infiltration to frozen soils and the fill and spill of networks of prairie wetlands.  The model was used to simulate the hydrology of Smith Creek, Saskatchewan, Canada with various wetland extent scenarios.  This model simulation exercise shows that prairie wetland drainage can increase annual and peak daily flows substantially, and that notable increases to estimates of the annual volume and peak daily flow of the flood of record have derived from wetland drainage to date and will proceed with further wetland drainage.