Snow melt- and rain?

The 2016 snow melt season is nearly over now.  It goes by very quickly and is usually done in a few weeks in June.  Conditions this year were initially a bit strange.  There was really not very much snow and things started to brown very fast once the melt began in early June.   The West River was flowing by June 6, which is almost the earliest we have seen since 2003 (2005 was the earliest, by a day.  Similar limited snow cover).  What was unusual was that we had several days of heavy rain in early June just as the melt was starting.  Aside from the shear discomfort of driving rain and wind on snow machines, this is an unprecedented event in our time at Cape Bounty, and rain is very important as it usually really speeds up snow melt because the rain has a lot of heat in it.  We'll have to wait for the numbers to say what the real effect was, but a strange start to the season.

Here are some photographs to compare how much the timing of snow melt has changed over the years.

In 2003, when we started, snow melt peaked around July 3.   This is what the East River looked like on June 27 as flow was just starting:

In 2005, snow melt peaked around June 8.  Here is the East River (looking towards the lake) on June 10.

The difference in spring snow melt has been nearly a month over the period we have worked at Cape Bounty.  That may not sound like much, but consider that the melt season usually only lasts until late August.  In warm years (like 2005, and so far 2016), the melt season is nearly 50% longer.  

So is 2016 really going to be a record warm year in the Arctic?  Some recent research suggests that we should not necessarily expect this, but it is not a simple answer as you will see.

2016 Reseach season: snow, soil and ice

This blog has been quiet for two years- hard to believe how fast the time went by.   We'll try to post more frequently, especially now that the field season is underway.

We opened the camp on May 18 and found the tents and equipment in generally good shape.   Conditions were already looking unusually warm based on weather from other stations in the area, and a pilot mentioned that he saw little snow on Melville Island while flying over in March.  

When we arrived, there seemed to be a lot of snow, especially around camp where we had to dig it out.  However, when we did our snow survey, we found it was quite the opposite.  Snow is a funny thing, you just can't measure it in one spot.  It blows around all winter and the depth tends to be quite different from place to place.  Each year we carry out a snow survey that involves 28 locations in the river basins and at each location, we measure depth in ten spots along a line.  We also collect snow samples with a metal tube and weigh the snow to determine how much water there actually is in the snow.  This gives us a way to calculate what hydrologists call the "snow water equivalence", or SWE (s-whee).  One way to think of SWE is how much water would be left on the land if you melted all of the snow.  It is measured as a depth, so you can think of the depth of water for a given SWE.  

The snow at CBAWO this year was very limited, the least we have measured since 2005.  It was 49 mm, about 60% of a typical year.  In many places, the snow was just a thin covering over the soil.  That indicates that there is very little water on the land for runoff this spring, something that is very important for many of the systems we monitor.

One of the things that we were interested in sampling this year was the frozen soil to see how much water was in it and how ice was formed the previous winter.  This affects how the soil thaws and how the water will flow in the soil.  Many researchers recover samples of the deeper permafrost, but this soil is not really permafrost, as it almost always thaws.  We refer to this as the "active layer", or the part of the soil that thaws during the summer.  As the name implies, this is the part of the soil where a lot of important things happen:  plants root, water moves and changes properties, and an important ecosystem of microbial life recycles dead plant matter and supports vegetation growth.  

To sample the frozen soil, we use a power auger and a hollow bit that cuts down and brings up frozen soil material.  The auger is big, powerful, and has a mind of it's own:  when it hits a rock, it can stop dead and throw the people operating it.  We give it a lot a respect and have affectionately named it 'Taz', after the Tasmanian Devil in the cartoons!

The frozen soil is pretty neat to look at.  This photo shows a section from 60-75 cm depth, and you can see some clear ice lenses and structure starting to appear.   Ice formed in these lenses late in the autumn and will only thaw late this coming summer.  When it does, the water released will be able to drain out, but we find the quality of this water is very different from snow runoff.  As you go deeper, there is even more ice, sometimes just ice for intervals of 10 cm or more.  

These samples will be analysed for their water content and we plan to get images of the ice structure while they are frozen using a special scanner like the ones they use in hospitals to image bones.  We hope by understanding how water is stored and moves through the soil at different times of year, we can better predict how climate changes will affect water in the High Arctic, and how this will contribute to the stability of the landscape and ecosystem.

And now to tease with an image that looks like something out of a movie.  No, it is not some futuristic weapon.  We actually put that underwater in the lakes to learn more about what is going on at the bottom.  That is a story for another time.  Thanks for following.

Ice caps melting

A short post to highlight news that has emerged, indicating that the ice caps in the Canadian Arctic are melting at an accelerated rate since 2005 (see article in Vancouver Sun).  This information is something that has been well understood in the research community for years, but it is striking that the increased loss of ice from these ice caps, including the Melville Ice Cap (about 150 km west of Cape Bounty) coincides with a period of remarkable warming at Cape Bounty.  The warmest July at Cape Bounty was in 2007, followed closely by 2011 and 2012.  Interestingly, July 2013 was cooler at Cape Bounty and reflects a cooling also noted in the article and on the ice caps.

These ice caps vary in size and sensitivity to change, and there are researchers working to understand these changes, but the same recent climate has had an important impact on our research at Cape Bounty.  In particular, and the widespread permafrost disturbance that we observed occurred in late July 2007 and occurred at a time when temperatures were greater than 20degC on some days.

One of the most visible forms of permafrost disturbance at Cape Bounty are slope failures called active layer detachments, or ALD for short.  These slides can be very large, up to 600 m long and 200 m wide, and move down slope long distances.  They move like a carpet slowly sliding down a slope, a thin layer that keeps moving until some obstruction slows it down.  As it loses momentum, the moving soil piles up in folds and comes to rest.

ALD are a potential risk to roads and other infrastructure that might be built in this region, and they impact water quality by increasing sediment erosion and causing additional salts to be released.  Other impacts likely occur, particularly by the release of soil organic matter that was buried for thousands of years, and allowing soil and water microorganisms to consume this different material.  How this affects the soil and water ecosystem remains poorly understood and is one of the topics we are studying at Cape Bounty.

While it is difficult to determine trends, especially with so much year to year variation in weather, both the ice caps and permafrost are responding to recent warming in the Canadian Arctic.  From the perspective of Cape Bounty, even if this trend reverses itself, the impact will remain on the land and affect the water for many years to come.

2014 and a new year

The holiday season has passed and we are now settling into the new year.  Planning work is ramping up for our 2014 field program at Cape Bounty.  We'll try to keep our progress posted, along with posts that give some insights into the experience of working at Cape Bounty and the research we are doing.  The contributions will be from a wide variety of people so you can expect all sorts of interesting material to show up here.

Setting sun on Cape Bounty (it will be back)

Around this time of year, the sun disappears at 75 degrees north and won't appear again until early February.  In theory, it gets completely dark, but that is really not the case.  When the moon is out and it is clear, it can be quite bright, and the snow tends to make it less than pitch black anyway.  Regardless, for all the years we have worked at Cape Bounty, we have not seen a sunset.

We set up time lapse cameras in 2012 to photograph both lakes hourly to determine when the ice cover formed.  These images are the last for both cameras, suitably showing a sunset (West Lake) and a sunrise (East Lake), but snow covered the cameras that night and then the November darkness came, so we don't know what happened after that.  The cameras worked well in the cold temperatures, but stored thousands of black or blurred images.  We relocated the cameras for 2013-14, so hopefully we'll be able to get that last light around now...

The old camp 2003-2010

The original camp at Cape Bounty was on a low ridge overlooking the West Lake.  We chose the site in May 2003 because it was free of snow in the spring, and the rock surface was very durable and relatively flat.   It was a good site with a great view, and it was close to most sampling locations, which is important when you are doing it every day for 6-8 weeks.  Even after seven years of foot traffic, the site looks untouched.

The problems though, started to mount as our research group grew.  Drinking water became scarce in some years in late July as the land dried up, and moving equipment to the airstrip down at the lake (on the far left of this picture) required an ATV or a lot of heavy hauling. Finally, the wind was much worse at this location than elsewhere. It all came to a head in August 2010 when the main tent was blown down the hill in a severe wind storm.  The tent, salvaged from an old mining exploration camp, was destroyed, and we decided it was time to move the camp.

This photograph was taken in June 2007 in the late evening (around midnight) from "latrine hill".  No one will miss having to slog up the hill for privacy, or to suffer in the wind when the weather was poor. Still, it was quite a view when the weather cooperated!

Camp- our home away from home

In 2011 we moved the camp from the hill north of the West Lake to a site at the air strip closer to the lake.  It is much better location that makes moving equipment in the summer possible without vehicles, and it is much smoother for sleeping on the ground.  Another important benefit is the close proximity of the lake and river for drinking water later in the season.  It is definitely less windy!

The camp is composed of a main Weather haven tent for cooking and meeting, and a smaller Weather haven tent for the latrine.  Moving to this location close to water meant that we had to install a propane-fired incinerating toilet.  It is not nearly as awful as it sounds!

We also set up temporary sleeping tents for each person about 200 m from camp.  You can see the "field' of the yellow tents on the left.

 Flights into CBAWO are either with ski- or wheel-equipped Twin Otters.  The lake ice provides a good landing site for the ski planes until early June.  The summer strip is marked on the tundra with white bags filled with rocks and is aligned with the prevailing northwest winds.  It looks quite soft, but it is actually river gravel with a soft moss cover, so the wheels of the plane compress it but do not sink in.  You can see in the foreground where we have had to fill in a frost wedge with gravel.  Each year, the wedges are settling more and this needs to be dealt with.

We leave the Weather haven tents up over winter and remove all food and cooking equipment from the site to avoid attracting animals.  Of course, the tracks and scat suggest we get frequent winter visitors.

It does not snow much in the High Arctic.  There is usually 20-40 cm of snow on the land, but it gets blown around and drifts extensively.  In the spring, our tents have caused massive snow drifts.  Thankfully, digging out was not too much of an issue, as long as we remember where everything is.  For this reason, we photograph the site before leaving in the summer, and we keep important things like tools, shovels and some fuel inside the main tent so it is easy to find.