Professor John Pomeroy was interviewed on 11th May 2015 by the CBC Radio One Calgary Eyeopener morning show, to discuss this year’s lower snowpack and early snowmelt, and the challenges of managing reservoirs so that they are equally effective for both flood control and sustaining low flows during dry years.

The interview also resulted in an article on the CBC website, available online here.

At the recent joint CGU / AGU congress in Montreal, Dr Cherie Westbrook presented a detailed assessment of the effectiveness of beaver dams as natural flood defences, based on observations made in the Kananaskis area during the major Alberta floods of June 2013. Her work has also been profiled in Science News, in an article available here.

The new International Network for Alpine Research Catchment Hydrology (INARCH), which has been established as a GEWEX cross-cut project following its founding by Professor John Pomeroy and an initial list of 25 participants from around the world, was formally announced in a recent edition of Nature. The article is available online here, and full details of the aims of INARCH are provided on its website.

The 24th April edition of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix includes an article discussing the federal government’s continued failure to formulate a climate-change mitigation strategy. It includes some forthright observations from the CH director Professor John Pomeroy about Canada’s embarrassing record in this area.

The piece is currently (25 April 2015) available online here, and as a PDF archive here.

With surveys by the Alberta Department of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development reporting generally below-average snowpack at lower elevations in the Alberta Rockies (details), and signs of an early melt already getting under way even at higher levels, the Calgary Herald has been asking CH staff for their perspective on what this may mean for water supplies in the coming summer.

In an article published on April 8th, Prof. John Pomeroy notes the connections between these patterns in Canada and persisting severe drought conditions in California.

The piece is available in its original form here, or as a PDF archive.

CH is to play a leading role in a major new scientific initiative, the International Network for Alpine Research Catchment Hydrology (INARCH).

With the strong encouragement of CH director Professor John Pomeroy, plans for the network have been devised over the past three years, by a global team of scientists interested in the dynamics of mountain climates, glaciers, snow, hydrology and associated ecological systems. It is intended to provide a forum for collaborative research, with the aim of developing and sharing improved understanding of these fragile and extremely important environments.

Scientists from more than 25 government institutions, universities and non-governmental agencies in 15 countries, spanning North and South America, Europe and Asia, have so far committed to contribute to the network’s activities.

In an important recent development, the new initiative has been adopted as a key ‘cross-cutting’ project under the auspices of the GEWEX Hydroclimatology Panel. With GEWEX being the core project of the UN-sponsored World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), INARCH will operate among the highest levels of mountain research world-wide.

More information is provided in an article published in the Rocky Mountain Outlook, available in its original form here, and as an archive PDF here.

The Centre for Hydrology provided commentary for a US National Public Radio food show The salt – what’s on your plate that dealt with the consumption of snow – Snow is delicious. But is it dangerous to eat?

Technical input ranged from concerns on the concentrations of various contaminants in snow, the contribution of prairie dirt to blowing snow, to the atmospheric scrubbing qualities of snowfall to a snow hydrologist’s recipe for snow.

More details from the discussion are available here.

The University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security has posted a series of videos describing the wide range of water-related research being conducted throughout the Saskatchewan River Basin, many of which feature the activities of faculty and post-graduate students in the Centre for Hydrology. These vignettes also highlight a variety of ways in which climate and environmental change is affecting Canadian biomes and water resources. They are available for viewing here: http://www.usask.ca/water/saskrb/Videos.php.

Professor John Pomeroy was recently asked by the Calgary Herald for his thoughts on the likely risks to North American ski resorts of diminishing alpine snowpacks as a result of changing climatic conditions.

Both modelled projections of future snowpack, and trends derived from data gathered over recent decades, strongly indicate that there is a risk of many mountain ranges in the western USA and Canada moving into the transient snow zone, and that this is likely to occur well within the coming century.

The article is available in its original form here, and as a PDF here.

CH Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr Colin Whitfield, together with CH’s Dr Cherie Westbrook and colleagues from the Global Institute for Water Security and School of Environment and Sustainability, recently published a research paper describing the environmental ramifications of beaver population recoveries around the globe.

The paper, in The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ journal AMBIO, is available here: releases describing the new knowledge it has generated are available from Springer, and from the U of S Media Relations office (here and here).

The National Post also ran an article on the paper in its December 19th issue, here.