The Calgary Herald has reported that the Alberta Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resources Development has set aside substantial budgets for natural hazard prediction and warning, including a new rainfall intensity alarm system for the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, flood-risk mapping and modelling.
These measures correspond closely to recommendations made by CH Director Prof. John Pomeroy in the aftermath of the June 2013 floods.
The article is available as a PDF download here.
The Calgary Herald has published several articles documenting discussions leading up to or occurring at the Changing Cold Regions Network Workshop on Extreme Weather and Hydrology, held in Canmore over the 11th and 12th of February 2014.
The articles include discussions of the mechanisms behind the 2013 Canadian Rockies flood, methods used to forecast them, and how forecasting should be carried out in the future.
They are available for download as follows;
Canmore’s Rocky Mountain Outlook has published the following article, ahead of next week’s workshop comparing the 2013 floods in Alberta and Colorado. It is also available online from this link.
Alberta, Colorado floods compared
Lynn Martel: Thursday, February 6, 2014
Nearly eight months after the milestone event, 50 researchers, academics, government scientists and engineers from across North America will gather in Canmore to participate in a workshop focused on the study and understanding of the 2013 floods that engulfed a wide swath of southern Alberta, including Canmore.
Speakers will include Canmore Mayor John Borrowman and Town of Canmore manager of engineering Andy Esarte, in addition to hydrologists and hydrometeorologists from universities and research centres in Montreal, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Washington D.C., Whitehorse, Boulder, Colorado and Fairbanks, Alaska. The purpose of the workshop is to evaluate, analyse and synthesize a case study of extreme weather and hydrology with a focus on the 2013 floods of Western Canada.
The free event, which is open to the public, takes place on Wednesday (Feb. 12) at Canmore Collegiate High School, at 7:30 p.m.
Most of those attending are members of the Changing Cold Regions Network (CCRN), a NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) funded research network led by the University of Saskatchewan. The CCRN’s objectives are to integrate existing and new sources of data with improved predictive and observational tools vital to understanding, diagnosing and predicting interactions among the cryospheric, ecological, hydrological and climatic components of the planet’s changing systems, with a geographic focus on Western Canada’s rapidly changing cold interior.
A key organizer of the workshop is Canmore resident Dr. John Pomeroy, the U of S director of hydrology who runs a network of field monitoring sites in the Rockies as part of the Canadian Rockies Hydrological Observatory and Coldwater Laboratory in Kananaskis.
“We are hosting it in Canmore because much of the flood of 2013 started due to high precipitation in this area, and because the University of Saskatchewan, and hence the Changing Cold Regions Network, had a large science research presence when the flood hit,” Pomeroy said.
One of the focus areas of the CCRN is the Canadian Rockies, he added, with a key area of study being extreme meteorological and hydrological events, such as the 2013 flood.
“Because of the Canadian Rockies Hydrological Observatory and Coldwater Laboratory in Kananaskis, researchers from the University of Saskatchewan and the CCRN have the opportunity to conduct specialized analysis of the climate, weather and hydrology associated with the flood,” Pomeroy said.
Dr. Roy Rasmussen, a hydrometeorologist and the senior scientist and director of the Hydrometeorology Applications Program at the Research Applications Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, will share a presentation on Wednesday, Feb. 12 that offers comparisons to the 2013 floods that hit Alberta and Colorado in 2013.
Having earned his PhD from UCLA in atmospheric science, Rasmussen’s field of study involves improving the understanding of the earth’s current and future water cycle, with a particular focus on orographic precipitation – precipitation that results from the lifting of moist air over a physical barrier, such as a mountain range.
After experiencing the high effect of the Colorado flood on people living in the front range of that state, Rasmussen said it’s worthwhile to compare what happened there with the flooding that swamped a large portion of southern Alberta.
“Some of the common issues include the ability of radars to properly estimate rainfall rates, the accuracy of the operational forecast, and the method to simulate the flooding,” Rasmussen said.
The most important lessons to be taken from the floods in both places include the need to improve the analysis and forecasting of precipitation and the resulting flood. As well, scientists must examine how best the impact of these types of floods might be mitigated in the future.
To that end, scientists such as Rasmussen must continually improve their climate models in order to be able to simulate local conditions accurately and obtain data that can be used to verify the models.
“The importance of Dr. Rasmussen’s talk is the opportunity to learn about the mechanics of the weather systems and subsequent flooding that occurred in the Colorado front ranges in September 2013, and start to compare them to what happened in this region in June,” Pomeroy said. “Boulder had much greater rainfall volume than did Canmore, but both involved extremely heavy volumes of precipitation on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and then destructive and rapid flooding of mountain and plains communities.
“It is useful to understand both the similarities and the differences and also to what degree these events are influenced by climate change – which has been predicted to increase the intensity of extreme events around the word.
“This is critical in assessing the likelihood of future floods of the size seen in Canmore or Boulder, which influences how prepared we need to be for the next one.”
Rasmussen’s presentation will be followed by an open panel discussion with U of S Canada Excellence Research Chair in Water Security Howard Wheater, Kevin Shook, research scientist at the U of S Centre for Hydrology, Rasmussen and Pomeroy.
The Edmonton Journal has included a quote by CH Director Prof. John Pomeroy in its 2013 Pop Quiz of Political Quips. The quote was:
We’ve got different atmospheric dynamics and we’re getting events like this that were improbable or even literally impossible before. And we should expect more of them.
Their corresponding ‘answer’ was as follows:
Ominously, Prof. John Pomeroy at the University of Saskatchewan warns us about the possibility of more climate-change-related extreme weather like the torrential rainfall that triggered the summer flooding in southern Alberta.
The piece is available online here.
The Calgary Herald has published an article reviewing the effectiveness and timeliness of flood forecasts issued in June 2013 for the Alberta mountains and foothills.
The piece quotes Centre for Hydrology e-mails sent before the flood, which were supplied following an ‘Access to Information’ request by the authors to the Province. Director John Pomeroy provided commentary to the article regarding the challenges in forecasting the flood.
The piece is currently available from the newspaper here, and in PDF form here.
CH Director Prof. John Pomeroy was recently (10th December 2013) interviewed by CBC TV News on the topic of the past summer’s floods in Alberta. The focus was a consultant’s report from April 2012, which highlighted many of the potential vulnerabilities in Calgary which were subsequently exploited by the flooding.
The video segment is available online here.
CH PhD student Nicholas Kinar successfully defended his thesis, tiled Acoustic Measurement of Snow, on 18 December 2013.
His research developed a novel acoustic method for the accurate measurement of snow water equivalent, density, wetness and temperature in seasonal snowpacks. This is expected eventually to supplant the snow tube and perhaps the snowpit as a primary means of measuring snow properties for hydrological and other snow applications – perhaps one of the most significant advances in snow measurement technology in our generation.
His committee was composed of external examiner Dr HP Marshall of Boise State University, chair, Dr Xulin Guo (U of S), members Dr Phil Marsh (Wilfred Laurier University), Dr Bing Si (U of S), Dr Doug Degenstein (U of S) and Dr John Pomeroy (U of S)
Congratulations, Nicholas!
The Come Hell and High Water talks hosted by CH Director John Pomeroy and Fellow Bob Sandford in Canmore on 25th November have been covered by an article in Canmore’s Rocky Mountain Outlook. The piece is available for download here.
The Calgary Herald has reported on CH work which indicates that flooding in the Bow Valley of the magnitude experienced during June 2013 is likely to occur approximately once in 32 years in the Banff area, and once in 45 years through Calgary: this is much shorter than the 100-year return period for this scale of event currently adopted by the Alberta Ministry of Environment and Sustanable Resource Development.
In the article, Prof. John Pomeroy also points out that changing climatic conditions (winters in the Banff area are now some 5°C warmer than they were in the late 1800s) are making it challenging to predict events of this type, and this hampers development of appropriate mitigation strategies. He suggests that improved observation, modelling and warning systems are required, together with changes in property development guidelines and infrastructure upgrades.
The article is available in full here.
The work of CH staff during and since this past summer’s flooding events in Canmore and across Alberta are described in an article by Bob andford in the Fall 2013 issue of the U of S’s Arts & Science Magazine, available here.