CANMORE - With nearly 400 attendees from 44 countries participating in talks, poster presentations and a field trip to the Athabasca Glacier, it was the largest conference of its kind ever hosted in Canada.
CANMORE - With nearly 400 attendees from 44 countries participating in talks, poster presentations and a field trip to the Athabasca Glacier, it was the largest conference of its kind ever hosted in Canada.
The eighth GEWEX Open Science Conference drew the world's top climate scientists to Canmore to share research outcomes, projects and understanding of key global issues arising from Earth's changing climate.
Topics discussed during 200 oral presentations at the GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Exchanges project) event focussed on research activities that advance what have been identified by the World Climate Research Programme as two of the "grand challenges"; weather and climate extremes, and water for the food baskets of the world.
The conference was structured around topics of challenges faced by scientists regarding their ability to understand and predict changes in climate extremes, the related availability of freshwater under the complex factors of natural variability, forced climate change due to human activity, and human management practices such as dams, reservoirs, land cover changes and agricultural management.
Speaking at Canmore Collegiate High School as part of a community event, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a prominent contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said a key issue associated with climate change is one of sustainability.
With more and more people living energy-demanding lifestyles as Earth's population grows from today's seven billion to a projected 10 billion, with the most energy being expended in western Europe and North America, adaptation to the rapid rate of change now occurring will be crucial.
"The overall question is one of sustainability," Trenberth said. "Can we sustain that? It's not so much the temperature, but the rate of change. Rapid change causes major disruptions."
Also speaking, Martyn Clark, senior scientist in the Hydrometeorological Applications Program at the U.S.'s National Center for Atmospheric Research, added that warming global temperatures are just one branch of the tree.
"How will we begin to adapt to these changes?" Clark asked. "Climate change is just part of the puzzle."
Addressing the conference delegates, Dr. Howard Wheater, GEWEX vice-chair, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Water Security and director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, which co-hosted the conference, drove home the point that freshwater resources are a major concern of modern times.
"Water is one of the major challenges of the 21st century," Wheater said. "Canada is host to a number of those specific challenges, including permafrost thaw causing massive changes in infrastructure."
Canada, he pointed out, is the only G7 country that does not have a nation-wide extreme weather warning system - a reality that needs to be addressed.
"Climate change is a contributing factor to weather extremes, including hot dry periods that create massive wildfires. The Fort McMurray fire is just one incident in many," Wheater said. "We need better science to understand how our environment is changing. And we need to do a much better job in monitoring and warning."
In the Rockies, he said, where three major Canadian river systems - the North and South Saskatchewan and the Mackenzie - originate, rapidly melting glaciers present a serious concern when coupled with the fact that the South Saskatchewan basin - of which the Bow River is a tributary - is fully allocated, while the province's population steadily grows.
"Alberta is developing rapidly and there are no more water resources," Wheater said. "The backdrop to all of this is rapid warming of Earth's climate. The glaciers are retreating, very fast, particularly in the last few years. The glaciers will be gone by the end of the century."
The icefields that feed those glaciers, however, he added, are at high enough elevations they will continue to exist beyond that time.
Speaking to about 60 conference participants on a field trip to the Athabasca Glacier, life-long Rockies' resident Bob Sandford, EPCOR Chair for Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, pointed out how the features of North America's most visited glacier mirror the retreat of glaciers worldwide.
"You can see from the size of these moraines that the glacier was much, much larger in very recent times," Sandford said. "It is estimated that the glacier has lost more than 60 per cent of its total mass through down-wasting and recession since the mid-19th century. The rate of down-wasting and recession that are taking place presently are unprecedented."
As the group admired 3,300-metre peaks surrounding them above the glacier still blanketed with its winter snow coat from their seats aboard an Ice Explorer vehicle, Sandford offered insight into the melting still to come.
"The ice beneath many of these moraines is also melting, which is one of the reasons this road is so difficult to maintain," Sandford explained of the route connecting the moraine to the glacier. "I would not be surprised in the least if instability of these moraines soon made vehicle access to the glacier by this route impossible."
Highlighting scientific research being carried out by the Western Canadian Cryospheric Network, his commentary was appreciated by the visiting scientists.
"Research (by the WCCN) has demonstrated that we lost some 300 glaciers in the mountain national parks region of the Rockies alone in the 85 years between 1920 and 2005," Sandford said. "This loss is expected to continue, with over 90 per cent of the ice that exists in the interior ranges of British Columbia expected to be gone by the end of this century."
For the hydrologists, government researchers, professors and modellers, some of whom had little or no previous experience around glaciers, the drive up the Icefields Parkway offered new perspectives on their own work, as did a visit to a University of Saskatchewan Centre for Hydrology research station at the Athabasca Glacier.
"I work with people on campus who study ice and glaciers. I sit in my office and do modelling," said Suzana Camargo, Lamont Research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York who specializes in hurricane research.
"It was cool seeing the instrument station, it's nice to see with your own eyes what you hear about all the time. It's so interesting you can see so much in the snow with your eyes and your instruments."
For Michael Ek, a former Alaska resident now working in the research applications laboratory at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the field trip added to the conference's valuable role of connecting researchers in their quest to solve some of humanity's big problems.
"It made me appreciate the diversity of the entire Earth system we're trying to represent," Ek said. "We have to understand snow hydrology, land/high atmosphere interaction. Everything that gets into the rivers gets into the sea. Especially in the northern latitudes, this is where we in GEWEX need to work. It's a team effort to work on representing our earth's systems."
