Due to unfortunate circumstances, HP Marshall will be unavailable to present his talk scheduled for 18th December at 1pm (144 Kirk Hall).

Instead, we are happy to announce that Nicholas Kinar will present a talk titled Acoustic Measurement of Snow.

Professor Hans-Peter Marshall of Boise State University will present a Centre for Hydrology seminar titled

Combining ground-based microwave radar, airborne LiDAR, and energy balance modelling to estimate spatial variability of snow properties.

The seminar will take place on Wednesday 18th Deceber at 1pm in 144 Kirk Hall.

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’!