John Pomeroy and Bob Sandford will present public talks in Canmore, Alberta in the Come Hell and High Water: Understanding Canada’s Changing Hydrology outreach event, hosted by the Town of Canmore and chaired by the Mayor of Canmore.

Pomeroy will discuss changes to hydrology and climate that have been occurring in the Canadian Rockies over the last century and the lead up to and progression of the extreme meteorological and hydrological event that became the flood of 2013.

Sandford will discuss how changes in hydroclimatic conditions will affect our society socially, economically and environmentally now and in the future.

The talks will be in the Canmore Collegiate High School Theatre starting 7 pm, Monday November 25^th.

The University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology and the Canadian Society for Hydrological Sciences will again be offering their successful and popular intensive course on the physical principles of hydrology, with particular relevance to Canadian conditions.

The course will take place at the University of Calgary Biogeoscience Institute’s Barrier Lake Station in the Kananaskis Valley, Alberta, from March 1-12, 2014.

Full details are available here. Demand is perennially high, so we must operate a policy of ‘first come, first served’!

There was excellent demand from across the country for the R Course at the CGU/CWRA meeting, but many from the U. of S. were unable to make it – so the Centre for Hydrology is giving an informal Introduction to R for Hydrologists class in late August for U. of S. faculty, staff and students who would like to start using this highly productive toolset in their hydrological calculations.
By Whom? Dr Kevin Shook, a research scientist with the Centre, who gave part of the R class to CGU
For Whom? Open only to U. of S. faculty, staff and students
How many? The first 80 people through the door will get a place!
When? Begins 9am, Thursday August 29th: continues all day
Where? Room 144 of Kirk Hall
In the spirit of open source software, the course will be
i) Free – no registration required
ii) Unofficial
iii) Open to any member of U. of S. faculty, staff or student body
The course will cover the following topics:
1. Getting started
– what R is and how it works
– getting and installing R
– getting help
– using the command line
– using the GUI
2. Using R
– data types
– commands
– importing/exporting data
– doing calculations
3. Graphs
– simple graphs
– special purpose graphs
– exporting graphs
– advanced graphing with ggplot2
4. Commonly used commands
– common statistical functions
– dealing with bad/missing data
– subsetting data
– aggregating data
5. Advanced
– linear models (regressions)
– writing R functions
– debugging
– accessing WISKI data from R
No background in R or programming is required. The course will be taught with demonstrations, so you are strongly encouraged to bring your laptop and work along. There is no credit or examination associated with this informal course – you will get out of it what you put into it.
You can download R from cran.stat.sfu.ca, and should load it and try it out before the course. R is most easily used with a GUI: probably the easiest and best is RStudio.

The Centre for Hydrology will be running a course in Cold Regions Hydrological Modelling for U. of S. Graduate Students, from the 4th to the 5th of September 2013. Department approval is required, and the course must be taken for credit.
The course will aim to familiarize students with the principles of object-oriented physically-based hydrological process modelling for the cold regions of western and northern Canada, and train students to use the Cold Regions Hydrological Modelling Platform (CRHM) to create purpose built hydrological models that are appropriate for hydrological prediction problems in western and northern Canada.
On completion, students should be able to describe which physical process algorithms are most appropriate for modelling forested, prairie, mountain and arctic river basins under various levels of meteorological and parameter data availability, and use CRHM to construct and run an appropriate hydrological model for small river basins in western and northern Canadian environments.
More information, including pre-requisite qualifications and details of how to register, is available online here, and also in PDF format.

To mark both World Water Day and the first two years of the Global Institute for Water Security’s existence,
Professor Howard Wheater, GIWS Director and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Water Security, will host a public lecture entitled Water Security in Western Canada: Progress and Prospects.
The event (for which the official notice is available here) is to take place from 4 to 6pm on Friday 22nd March, in the Convocation Hall, Peter MacKinnon Building.

Dr Jim Bruce, former senior manager in Environment Canada and the World Meteorological Organisation, is giving a public talk in Canmore, Alberta on Thursday 21 February at 7:30 pm in the Canmore Civic Centre.
Details of the lecture were published in Canmore’s Rocky Mountain Outlook (here), and are available in PDF form here.

The Centre for Hydrology is organising a workshop to mark 50 years of academic activity at its Marmot Creek Research Basin, to be held from 21-22 February 2013 at the Coldwater Centre, Barrier Lake Biogeoscience Institute, near Kananaskis, Alberta.
This meeting will
– Celebrate the half-century of work at the Basin
– Review the challenges, designs and results of over this time, and
– Plan future scientific activities
Talks and posters are solicited on a range of topics: the abstract submission deadline is 15 January 2013.
More information is available here

The University of Saskatchewan and the Canadian Society for Hydrological Sciences will again be offering their successful intensive course on the physical principles of hydrology with particular relevance to Canadian conditions.
The course will take place at the University of Calgary Biogeoscience Institute’s Barrier Lake Station in the Kananaskis Valley from March 1-12, 2013.
Full details are available here. Demand is perennially high, so we must operate a policy of ‘first come, first served’!

The Centre for Hydrology is co-sponsoring a suite of presentations hosted by the Interpretive Guides’ Association on Thursday, March 1 at the Policeman’s Creek Drop-In Centre in Canmore, AB, entitled Why Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Ice and Snow.
The evening will feature presentations by Prof John Pomeroy (Director of the Centre for Hydrology), Bob Sandford (CH associate and chair of the Canadian arm of the UN’s Water for Life Decade), and glaciologist Dr Shawn Marshall (University of Calgary): all three presenters are key members of the Western Watersheds Research Collaborative.
“Canadians love their snow and its beauty, but often see it as something to be only shovelled or skied upon,” says Dr Pomeroy. “But, not only is it one of the most beautiful and physically complex natural phenomena, it is the home of many plants and animals, the food source for many more and the provider of water for the alpine summer and for the rivers that drain the mountains to provide water to the parched prairies.”
The role of snow as a part of the mountain ecosystem, how it interacts with forests and alpine vegetation and how it is sensitive to climate warming comprise just part of the focus of the presentation.
Summarizing the recent findings of two networks of cold regions research funded by the Canadian Foundation for Climate & Atmospheric Science that form the basis of his forthcoming book, Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Fresh Water, Mr Sandford will focus on how seemingly small changes in temperature are influencing not just Canada’s climate, but also Canadians’ very identity.
“We are likely the first generation of human beings to accurately measure and fully understand how what we may have once thought were very small relative changes in mean temperature – changes as small as a single degree Celcius – can result in changes in the behaviour of the atmosphere noticeable enough to be reflected in the patterns of the seasons,” Sandford said.
“Because the most pronounced warming is occurring in winter, the most visibly obvious changes are related to the extent and duration of snow pack and snow cover. Snow cover, atmospheric circulation and temperature are inter-dependent and relate to one another as feedbacks. Water and temperature define climate. Climate defines ecosystems; and ecosystems define us.”
“In the absence of snow we would be different people living in a different world. It appears that, in the context of where and how we live in Canada, cold really does matter.”
Dr Marshall will discuss the latest research findings related to the effects of contemporary climatic trends on the extent and influence of glaciers in Canada’s western mountains and abroad, while Pomeroy will share the findings of his own research.
“The water security of Western Canada is predicated on the preservation of the natural flows and storage of mountain snow, ice and water,” Pomeroy said. “This controls our natural ecosystems and our ability to provide communities, food and energy throughout Western Canada. We risk everything by losing it, and so must conserve our mountain cold environments.”
Why Cold Matters: The State and Fate of Canada’s Ice and Snow takes place on Thursday, March 1 at the Policeman’s Creek Drop-In Centre. Doors open at 7 with the presentation beginning at 7:30. Admission is free.

The 11th annual Western Canada CGU Hydrology Section student conference will be held at the University of Saskatchewan on February 11th, 2012.
Abstracts (max 250 words) are invited for oral presentations by CGU members, by January 25th, 2012.
More information about the event – including details of how to submit your abstract – is available here