Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Ongoing and future climate change is reshaping the ecosystems of northern regions. The accelerated warming at high latitudes is driving reductions in the amount and extent of snow cover, which impacts seasonal river flooding, soil temperature and microbial decomposition, climate, and vegetation. Understanding the drivers and patterns of snow cover response to climate change is thus important to project the impacts of changing snow conditions on ecosystems and human activities. However, the snow cover displays large heterogeneity in the landscape, in response to varying topography and vegetation, and their interactions with weather processes. Measuring and understanding the heterogeneity of these complex 'snowscapes' (landscapes covered by snow) is difficult and representing this heterogeneity within large scale land surface models is even more challenging. This program will study the snow cover spatial heterogeneity at three experimental sites along a boreal-Arctic gradient in Eastern Canada, using state-of-the-art drone and satellite remote-sensing methods combined with direct measurements. These data will be analyzed to reveal the key environmental drivers and dominant spatial scales of snow cover variability. The impact of small-scale snow cover heterogeneity on coarse scale model projections will be studied using multi-resolution modelling experiments. Several methods will be developed and compared to include the effect of snow cover heterogeneity within coarse scale models, in order to increase the robustness of snow cover projections under present and climate conditions. The program will allow training up to six highly qualified personals in cold region environmental science, with skills in fieldwork instrumentation and logistics, remote-sensing and modelling, and well equipped to address future challenges in environmental science and management. The knowledge generated in this program will have practical benefits for climate change impact assessment in cold regions, flood forecasting in snow-affected regions, and projections of meltwater inflow to hydropower reservoirs in Canada under present and future climates. The improvement of snow cover representations within land surface models used for climate impact assessment will also help to guide climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies in northern regions.