Professor John Pomeroy has been invited to make a presentation titled The Mountain Hydrology behind the Alberta Flood of 2013 as part of the University of Calgary’s Energy and Environmental Systems Specialization Seminar Series.
The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 3pm on Monday 6th October in EEEL 210 (Energy. Environment. Experiential Learning, 750 Campus Drive).
This month’s R Lunch will take place on Wednesday October 15th at 11:30am in Physics 126.
It will be presented by Phillip Harder, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Hydrology. The title of his presentation is: How reproducible is your research?: Principles and R examples
Bring your lunch and learn something new!
You are invited to the next R Lunch, an occasional series showing how R is used in the university.
It will be on Wednesday September 17 at 12:00 noon in Arts 213.
This session will be presented by Dr. Nicole Nadorozny, who is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dept. of Computer Science.
Her presentation touches on R, GIS and hydrology, so will be of interest to many people.
Title:
WaterToolbox Tool – A River Health Assessment Tool
Presentation Summary:
A scientifically-based statistical protocol for conducting baseline assessments in river indicators was developed for Saskatchewan Watersheds using R open source software. The empirical assessments quantify the state of rivers and indicate if conditions have stayed the same, improved or deteriorated given time series available.
A WaterToolbox tool for ESRI ArcGIS was developed to implement the statistical framework for system application. The tool uses monitoring data from Provincial and Federal sources accessed via a file geodatabase and runs the R scripts through a Python interface within the ArcGIS platform.
Bring your lunch and learn something new!
Author Ed Struzik has written an article on the loss of snow and glaciers in the Canadian Rockies and how this threatens water resources in Western Canada. The article highlights some research results from the Centre for Hydrology and allied researchers in western Canada. It is available online here.
The Partners FOR the Saskatchewan River Basin and the Canadian Water Resources Association (Saskatchewan Branch) will be holding their conference at the Delta Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon from October 27-29, 2014.
The theme for the conference will be Long-Term Threats to the Saskatchewan River Basin.
More information is available in a PDF, on the conference web-site at www.skriverthreats.com, or contact PFSRB at partners@saskriverbasin.ca.
Research at the Fortress Mountain Snow Laboratory of the Canadian Rockies Hydrological Observatory was highlighted in a recent article in the Rocky Mountain Outlook.
The article described a day in the field with Dr Jonathan Conway, Postdoctoral Fellow with the Centre for Hydrology and his field research on the energetics of mountain snowmelt. Dr Conway’s postdoctoral research, which is supervised by Dr Warren Helgason of the Dept of Civil and Geological Engineering and Dr John Pomeroy, will advance our understanding of turbulent and radiative transfer to alpine snowpacks and glaciers. The Canadian Rockies Hydrological Observatory, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, is now almost completely installed.
The unprecedented summer flooding through parts of the prairies over past weeks has prompted a series of requests for insights and comments from hydrologists. In response, CH staff have given several interviews, giving rise to the following articles and reports:
Prof. John Pomeroy:
Dr Kevin Shook
The US NOAA National Water Center, located on the University of Alabama’s campus at Tuscaloosa, is currently advertising a number of opportunities which may be of interest to CH students and other hydrologists.
The advertisement – which also provides an interesting insight into the breadth and depth of the enhancement of US federal research activities relating to hydrology – is available at http://www.vsp.ucar.edu/opportunities/NWC_Alabama.html.
Dr Kevin Shook, SGI Research Fellow at CH, was asked by the Calgary Herald to comment on the heavy rainfall which has been hitting the prairies during the past week: the storm dropped more than the historical average precipitation for all of June over an extensive area (the town of Redvers, for example, received between 7 and 9 inches in two days), and led to widespread flooding. He sees storms like these as contributing to a pattern of increasing occurrences of multi-day rainfall events he’s detected across the region through analysis of climate data from the past century. The article is available online here, and in PDF format here.
On the same topic of prairie flooding, Prof. John Pomeroy has been interviewed several times by local radio stations:
– 660 News Radio (30 June)
– CBC The Morning Edition – Saskatoon (2nd July)
– CBC Saskatoon Morning (2nd July)
Graduate students and faculty associated with the Centre for Hydrology have done exceptionally well in winning awards and scholarships in 2014 and deserve recognition for their success. With top prizes for senior scientist at the Canadian Geophysical Union (CGU) and graduate students at CGU and the Society of Wetland Science, top thesis awards at the MSc and PhD levels from the University of Saskatchewan, four NSERC PhD scholarships, five Saskatchewan Innovation and Opportunity Scholarships and a rare Becas Chile PhD scholarship for overseas training there is much to be proud of for these fine scholars. Congratulations.
List of awards and scholarships received in 2014:
Centre Faculty
Centre Graduate Students