Walking uphill along the edge of a groomed ski run at Nakiska, I followed Dr. John Pomeroy, head of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology, his research assistant Logan Fang, and field technician May Guan. Each of us carry backpacks with lunch, hot thermos, emergency layers, and snowshoes, while the three researchers hiked with the added weight of equipment including scoops and cutters for measuring snow density, tool kit, a snow tube scale, keyboards and storage modules for downloading data, serial-USB interfaces for dataloggers and even a laptop computer.

Since 2003, the IP3 (Improved Processes and Parameterization for Prediction in Cold Regions) research network has been conducting snowpack depth and density studies in Canada’s cold regions with sites at Marmot Creek, Peyto Glacier and Lake O’Hara in the Rockies, Wolf Creek in Yukon, Havikpak and Baker Creek in NWT and Polar Bear Pass in Nunavut.

“The easy science has always been done in places that are easy to drive a truck up to,” Pomeroy said. “Those places have years of detailed measurements. It’s the Arctic and the higher elevations, the more remote areas that have the big questions now. We don’t have nearly enough snow, glacier, water, and weather observing stations in the Rockies. The region is undergoing rapid climate warming and changes to snowfall patterns which are causing glacier retreat, shorter snow seasons and impairing the ability of river headwaters to generate reliable streamflow for vast downstream regions.”

Those regions include the South Saskatchewan River Basin, which supplies water to much of the Prairies, and also the Athabasca River, which is a sub-basin of the Mackenzie River system – Canada’s largest.

The trip, navigable only by snowshoes, goes uphill for 800 metres. This was no beginner’s snowshoeing trail, but a first-rate test of mountain fitness. I found myself chuckling at the thought of climate change deniers so gleefully firing off letters to the editor accusing “Climategate” scientists of fudging research data for the reward of increased funding. No amount of funding, I concluded, would motivate any person to endure such a slog.

Pomeroy and his team will enthusiastically make this ascent repeatedly throughout the remainder of the winter for the simple reward of recording wind and precipitation data.

Finally reaching tree-line three-and-a-half hours after leaving the parking lot, Pomeroy checked the readings on a weighing Geonor snow/rain gauge that resembled a two-metre tall amusement park giant swing ride. The temperature read -3.5 C, the wind was blowing three metres per second from the south, humidity was 60 per cent. An aluminum ladder was propped against a tree, its base firmly buried in the snow. Most years, Pomeroy said, the snowpack would become so deep that they’d need the ladder to access the gauge.

Continuing along the windswept ridge, Fang and Guan walked a transect line, measuring the snow depth every five metres and every 20 metres recording its weight using the snow tube Fang carried up and a spring scale specially calibrated for the purpose. The deepest snow was 159 metres, the shallowest two centimetres.

We moved on to a smaller outlier station on the north side of the ridge, then to one on the south, where the researchers plugged in USB cables and downloaded data. The information recorded gives them the ability to calculate the snow water equivalent (SWE, pronounced swee), the depth of water that would be standing if the snowpack were transformed to liquid water – or the equivalent depth in rainfall.

“The trick was to keep a solar panel here that wouldn’t blow away,” Pomeroy said. “We had some disasters at first. The first one was attached to two sections of T bar – that’s what cattle ranchers use. It got bent over by the wind. I’ve never seen that!”

The winds on Fisera Ridge regularly reach 150 kilometres per hour.

Hanging at the far end of a steel pipe arm, two domes called radiometers measure solar radiation and thermo infrared radiation, both what’s coming in and going out. An ultrasonic snow depth gauge bounces a signal off the snow to record its depth.

“It works like a range finder in an old Polaroid camera,” Pomeroy explained. It also measures soil temperature, soil moisture and snow temperature. Each instrument on the metal frame is wired into a data logger, a computer with a series of ports which applies voltage to the instruments for a few milliseconds and measures what comes back, in a manner similar to a volt meter.

Measurements are taken every 10 seconds, saved up in the datalogger memory, averaged and then stored in the datalogger permanent memory every 15 minutes. Once a day the datalogger downloads data to a website via a telemetry system. The data goes through a modem to a radio which sends the numbers to a radio attached to another datalogger in a clearing at the Marmot Creek upper clearing site lower on the mountain, then is sent via a cell phone as digitized info to an IP site.

The raw data can be read from a computer in Saskatoon, where Pomeroy was based at the U of S campus until relocating to Canmore last July, to be closer to his research sites. Remote sites such as this require regular and frequent monitoring.

The computer in Saskatoon puts the data on a website,  http://www.usask.ca/hydrology/ Pomeroy checked it before we hiked up that morning.

Encased in a separate black box, a time lapse camera is triggered by the data logger to take two photos per day - one in late morning, one early in the afternoon - of the snow covered area in the cirque below Mount Allan’s summit.

“We’re interested in the snow covered area,” Pomeroy said. “During the snowmelt that tells us how much of the basin is melting and contributing to the stream flow. It’s most important in May, June and July. This is the least amount of snow I’ve ever seen in all the years I’ve been coming here. We could be looking at the D-word – drought.”

Even going downhill, it takes a full two hours to hike quickly back to the parking lot. No summit tagged, no fresh powder turns, no retention incentives, no performance bonuses.

Just another tiny drop in the stream of hydrological research.