A highly skilled team hikes out into Vancouver Island’s mountains five times a year to collect critical water supply data.
Several times a year, a team of B.C. scientists hikes into mountains on Vancouver Island, laden with heavy snowpack core-testing gear and skis to get into hard-to-reach places, and camps in the snow, sometimes in -15 C temperatures or blizzards.
To get to base camp, about 1,350 metres above sea level at Castlecrag Mountain, south of Mount Washington, they first take a helicopter — that’s the easy part.“It can be really tough,” says Emily Haughton, a science technician with the Hakai Institute, which conducts long-term scientific research at remote locations on B.C.’s coast.
The goal is to figure out the amount of water that is held in the snow that could be available once all the snow melts and is stored in a reservoir, Haughton said. “It’s a bit scary when you think about that 40 per cent … If climate change continues as it is, then I think a change in snow cover will have massive implications, especially in watersheds that primarily derive their water from the snowpack, as opposed to rain or glacial-fed .”
“Initially, it was a research and development kind of project, but this year, we’ve moved to being able to go and do a LiDAR flight survey and then get data back within a week, and then use that operationally to figure out how much water is available in the snowpack,” said Marshall.
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