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By Peter Caufield
A team of University of Calgary researchers has purchased 400 Veriteq temperature and humidity recorders for its three-year study of climate change in the southern Alberta foothills.
Beginning in summer 2003, the scientists will place the data logging recorders throughout a 200-by-50-kilometre plot of land in Kananaskis Park, which is near Calgary. The data loggers, which come equipped with Veriteq sGo for Palm software for easy mobile data collection, will automatically measure and record temperature and relative humidity at 30-minute intervals.
Geography professor Shawn Marshall, who leads the research team, says the study, called the Foothills Climate Array (FCA), is the most comprehensive climate-monitoring project ever attempted in the back-country.
"Climate change is complex," Marshall says. "We need to get down to the scale where it affects things like our parks, our ski areas, and our people. The FCA will help us add the kind of regional insight that is not possible when looking at climate on a global scale."
Marshall hopes the study will shed some light on the phenomenon of glacier retreat in the eastern Rocky Mountains and how it affects Alberta's supply of drinking water in the summer. "There's been a trend for reduced moisture in Alberta, leading to smaller winter snow packs and diminished summer runoff," he says. "We want to study where that snow comes from and how it is distributed, and see how this might impact irrigation and agriculture in southern Alberta."
Marshall says water supply is becoming an increasingly important issue in Alberta, where demand has been rapidly increasing, but supplies have been just as quickly growing scarce. "Most of the surface water in the area, the Bow and South Saskatchewan Rivers, flows from the mountains as snow and ice melt," he says. "Recent winters have been warm and dry, leading to an extended period of water resource stress in southern Alberta. Groundwater tables and reservoirs are dangerously low and the winter of 2002-2003 certainly won't help."
Marshall chose Veriteq's Spectrum data loggers for the FCA study because he has been using them since 2000 on a similar climate-monitoring project, and is pleased with their performance.
"I've been extremely impressed with Veriteq's data loggers and the company's support for them," he says. "They're ideal for our study. They're light, portable, reliable, inexpensive and they come with a projected 10-year battery life."
Marshall's team has also used some data loggers made by a Veriteq competitor. Although they come with a projected three-year battery life, about one-half of them have died after only one year. "In contrast, we haven't had any Veriteq failures yet, despite the harsh environment the loggers work in," Marshall says. "Sometimes they're buried under several feet of snow, but they keep on working."
Marshall says the Veriteq humidity and temperature logger performs well in extreme Alberta winter temperatures. "It records temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius," he says. "Rival sensors are less accurate at cold temperatures, and they can't record relative humidity below 0 degrees Celsius, which makes them unsuitable for our purposes in Alberta."
"It has been a very positive experience to work with an enthusiastic young Canadian company that is interested in our applications and is willing to work with us in supporting our research efforts."
The results of the study will improve scientists' understanding of regional patterns of temperature and precipitation variability, and enable meteorologists and researchers to generate better extrapolations from Environment Canada weather stations.
"Most Canadian weather stations, especially those with long-term records, are in urban areas or valley bottoms," Marshall says. "To understand how local observations reflect regional climate change impacts, we need improved models of how elevation, surface environment and different weather systems control regional weather. That is really our objective."
Marshall says the data gathered by the FCA will also be used to understand the interaction of weather and environment in other parts of Canada and the rest of the world. "We know that weather and climate can vary significantly in a small area, particularly in complex terrain, but computer limitations make it difficult to accurately represent those variations in global climate models," he says. "We hope to develop regional-scale "down-scaling" models to help interpret climate change forecasts that are relevant to human activities and ecosystems. For example, what effect does a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius have on ski areas compared to farmlands?"
Veriteq Marketing Manager Rick Schellenberg says Veriteq's humidity and temperature loggers have many other applications besides the study of climate change. They include testing and validation of pharmaceutical equipment and storage areas; testing of product packaging (e.g. pharmaceuticals, building insulation, electronics cabinets); monitoring of clean rooms; monitoring of calibration lab rooms; and temperature and humidity mapping of warehouses.
Schellenberg says Veriteq makes the "BMW" of data loggers. "We start with high quality components, calibrate them very carefully and then test them thoroughly," he says. "The result is a high-performance test instrument."
Veriteq's many customers appreciate the compact size of the loggers. "Thanks to efficient design, surface mount technology, miniature components and advanced manufacturing techniques, we've been able to put a lot of functionality into our loggers," Schellenberg says. "Part of the efficient design involves the use of PC's and Palm hand-helds for user interface, processing, display, and reporting, instead of building those same functions into the loggers themselves."
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