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.