#laurierges

[lets-tundra-snow-blog]

[tvc-hydro-research]

Research profile: Matt Tsui

Hello everyone, my name is Matthew Tsui, a man with few words. I’m finishing up my last year in BA Mathematics at Wilfrid Laurier University. Many would say it is an unusual change from math to geography, but I’ve recently found great passion in physical geography and was deeply inspired by James Balog’s work (innovator of the Extreme Ice Survey program). I largely enjoy the outdoors and adventuring into new territories.

My Mission is to learn how our climate has changed and how it will change. I am truly grateful to Philip Marsh and Tyler De Jong, giving me a learning opportunity at TVC. This is my first field season in the arctic. Upon arrival, I was astonished by the scenery of the surrounding environment.  My current interest lies within hydro-meteorological forecasting, which could include snow accumulation and ablation models or snowmelt-runoff models. My role at camp is to be a research assistant to Phil Mann, Branden Walker, and Evan Wilcox. It’s truly an honor working and learning from them all. I have gained so much knowledge and experience from data retrieval at the Met Station to snow surveys since my arrival. Special thanks to Tyler de Jong, Phil Mann, and Branden Walk for their patience and guidance during my trip. Also, extra shout out to Gabriel Hould Gosselin for teaching me the eddy covariance system and allowing me to work with his data.

e

[tvc-hydro-research]

May 8th Update

Well it’s been a while since our last update post. With our good buddy Tyler gone things have begun to fall apart around here. And by fall apart, I mean in the sense that there is some undisclosed tension among the camp as everyone is fighting to “handle the jokes”…

The weather has been pleasant over the last few days, however it has been slightly too cloudy and windy to do any UAS flying. We used our much needed down time to go on a short snowmobile expedition to see the outlet of Trail Valley Creek as is flows into the Husky Lakes network. As the stream has been flowing for a solid ten days there is a large amount of ponding on the ice surface. During our scenic rendezvous we had many stops along the channel. This reach of the channel is quite scenic, hosting deeply incised channels and very dense forest patches. The topography changes a lot which made snowmobiling very fun. Once we arrived on the Husky Lakes Branden decided to try his hand at ice fishing, but he didn’t catch anything in that very short time before giving up and moving on. We then stopped by our neighbour’s cabin and checked if anyone was home. After leaving a note (as any friendly neighbour would) we headed back home for dinner. To add insult to injury we had fish….

All is well in terms of camp life. With the loss of Tyler (the “guy who handles the jokes”) a power struggle exists with everyone trying to fill his humorous shoes (totally biased, but I think I’m winning). Today the sun finally peaked out from behind the clouds. Looking at the forecast for TVC reveals warm temperatures and sunshine which is good for both camp life and science. Bring on the snowmelt!

Even without a busy science schedule over the past few days we have kept very busy. Just when something gets fixed something else breaks. In our situation the two major culprits are our heater and the EcoJohn incineration toilet. The heater works great, however it leaks as much as a screen door on the bottom of a boat! I think we have fixed the problem for good (the same thing we thought previously). Our second camp crux is the incinerating toilet. This thing hasn’t functioned at 100% since day 1. We’ve had some success, some failures. Good times and bad. I think it’s time we see other people. Hello simple bucket!  

With the toilet acting as no more than a massive weight holding our outhouse down we decided we needed to improve our bathroom experiences. This resulted in us building a pair of shelves from recycled pallets. Our theme is now industrial barn board chic.

Science Update

As I had mentioned there still hasn’t been much change in terms of snowmelt or runoff (at least in Siksik Creek). Today Branden had to save the weir from some nasty leaks. I guess this is what you would expect trying to build on permafrost. As of today, there is a large runoff pond upstream from the weir but no overflow as of yet. The rest of the channel is still covered in saturated snow.

We have been using this time to begin processing some of our UAS data. I have started to look at the end-of-winter flights and have combined these with our lidar dataset to create rough snow depth maps of Siksik Creek. Ground validations (magnaprobe snow surveys) have shown a good relationship, but we know we can improve our results. My plan was to try and process as much flight data as possible before heading home. This has proved to be an unrealistic goal as not even our fancy fanless computer can keep up with the massive amounts of data. We’re talking 10 gigabyte raster files at 3cm resolution (this is not our final output, it is too large to work with).

In other areas Evan has discovered that the lakes are covered with runoff water ponding on the ice. He has also discovered some small runoff channels carving through the snowpacks.

With the warm weather and the ripe snowpack we are expecting a rapid snowmelt with large amounts of runoff in the stream beginning tomorrow (hopefully). This will keep us busy with snow surveys, UAS flights, stream discharge measurements, and other field studies. We are trying to enjoy our downtime before the work load inevitably increases.

Tonight is movie night again. On deck: Pulp fiction

B.

[lets-tundra-snow-blog]

Well, this is one of my first posts on this site. I have a fair amount of time on my hands waiting for the snow to melt, and I’ve decided that I’d rather post here than socialize with the 5 others stranded in the weatherhaven (sarcasm). This internet thing is a curse! The concept of connection to the outside world is nice, but it takes away from the remote feel of being up here. Although I must say it has come in quite handy so far with troubleshooting equipment, updating software, contacting the boss, downloading Game of Thrones...... I guess you could say its been both a blessing and a curse- just like almost everything else up here. 

 I have a large amount of pictures from over the years, but Im trying to start fresh and post relevant and new stuff for those people who have creeped my Facebook. I have been trying to refrain from flooding the main camp blog (and the numerous other social media sites that I cant seem to get away from) with personal stuff, so I think Ill leave some of it here. 

Research has gone quite well to this point, even with the super early snowmelt and a large amount of camp maintenance to be done. Our historic end of winter snow surveys went well and were crossed off the checklist by Phil Mann and myself in a couple of hard-spent days. We were also able to do multiple wonderful (and intensive) days of snow surveys across Siksik Creek basin, giving us the best possible estimate of snow water equivalent. In conjunction I have been able to get numerous UAS flights in with three different cameras. This gives us some options for finding the best possible scenario to map snow depths. 

The data is already beginning to stack up. I have about a weeks worth of UAS flights with an average of about 4 flight per day. I have begun to quickly process the data and would like to have it done before returning to Laurier. Theses files are adding up quickly, with over 70 Gigabytes of preprocessed data currently queued for full processing. Thank goodness for technology. 

The snowpack is pretty wet at the moment, and nearly isothermal at 0c. It will likely only take one more sunny day above 0c to cause some runoff. I am ready for that day to come, preferably sooner than later too. We have has some cool and foggy weather which has slowed down the melt rates, but with a forecast constantly calling for rain I have been on the edge of my seat. Rain on snow is just another variable to measure... just another complication. Nonetheless my weir is ready(ish), my loggers are installed, snow surveys complete, UAS flights ongoing, isotope bottles filled, and stilling well..... dry.

Bring on the melt! 

B