Cruise Report

This will be my dropbox for cruise updates, I'll try to send them as often as possible to the list of people who wanted them, but I'll also put it up here for anyone not on the direct e-mail list.

I leave Winnipeg on Sunday morning bound for Quebec City, where we'll begin to mobilize our equipment (i.e. put it on the ship) and test things out before they go. I know I'll need to do some other things in Quebec (POUTINE!) before we depart on July 2nd. Fortunately this leaves us with July 1st open, going to go party it up for Canada Day before leaving on that red and white icebreaker.

June 2010

Canadian Association of Geographers Conference

Mosaic

Back to Winnipeg

Shipping

Ocean Colour Algorithms?

Packing

Procrastinating

Catching up

Which brings us to today.

Plan for the next week:

CEOS BBQ, working some more, then Spruce Woods Provincial Park for the weekend.

More about the cruise later.

May Long Weekend

May long weekend a long trip back to Saskatchewan for me. I decided that an upcoming presentation on grass fires required some in situ work that I didn’t manage to do in my last three years in Val Marie.
It was also an excuse to see some of the people I miss from out there.The drive in was long, taking me down the #1 highway from Winnipeg to Swift Current—with a short stop at home in Regina—then south on highway 4 through Cadillac. This view greeted me as I crossed a drainage divide:

If it couldn’t get more majestic than that, I saw a fairly large doe prance well in front of me on the highway, perfectly lit up by the fading sunlight against a backdrop of dark skies.
That cloud became quite the boomer overnight, but there is nothing like a prairie thunderstorm to clear the air and make things seem fresh.

My first day in Val Marie saw going for a hike in Grasslands National Park with a friend to look for a snake hibernaculum and a hike up 70 mile butte near the park gates. The afternoon was field scouting, where I got the fire pictures I wanted:

Notice the line between the unburnt (left) and burnt (right) areas.

After a couple days of catching up, it was time to head to Regina for the weekend’s highland games. The band played well, considering the number of auxiliary members from out of town such as myself, and won the Grade IV Saskatchewan Championship...

..in a three-way tie. Everybody wins!

I’m an optimist like that.

More coming on the ol' thesis front, and next week the Prairie Summit in Regina!

The Thesis Topic

Processes at the interface between biological and physical realms are fascinating. All life depends on its environment, and we live in a time when the environment is changing. I am undertaking a study that will reveal one such interface at a time when it is rapidly changing to reach a new equilibrium, the study of the effects of a changing sea ice regime on bio-optical indicators in Hudson Bay, Canada.

This study involves the use of both in situ and orbital data collection. The former is undertaken using a combination of above- and below water light sensors and direct measurements to determine the optical characteristics of the water and the corresponding bio-mass composition. This will allow me to choose an algorithm that best relates the actual biomass content of water to its spectral characteristics. Hudson Bay is an optimal area for this due to seasonal ice cover and spatially-stable polynyas—areas of continually open water. From the geographer’s perspective this provides for understanding of an area of interest, the polynya, and a seasonally ice-covered area as a control.

This direct research is the key to a larger-area analysis of the waters in northwest Hudson Bay. These measurements will be analyzed for primary productivity, biomass, non-organic matter, and suspended particles so that satellite measurements can be calibrated to the water’s character. This is complicated by the notoriously difficult ‘Case 2’ waters of Hudson Bay where the dominant optical properties are influenced by sediments and coloured dissolved organic matter rather than biomass.

The second stage of this research will use the two major types of satellite data—microwave and optical—to relate the spatial patterns of biomass and primary production in Hudson Bay to the character of the sea ice in an attempt to predict how changing sea ice will influence the basis of ecology. The microwave portion will use a new technique for understanding spatial and temporal patterns called hypertemporal remote sensing (Piwowar and LeDrew 1995). This is accomplished by combining dozens or hundreds of spatially registered images and temporally unmixing their spatial features into endmembers—a sort of synoptic climate of spatial patterns. This will produce highly useful, current spatial characteristics of sea ice in Hudson Bay.

The parts fall into place in the final analysis. A data fusion will be performed that combines the in situ ocean colour optical data with remotely sensed satellite imagery to discern patterns in primary production or biomass. This is then fused with the endmembers from the microwave data and statistically related to find whether ice presence or absence is a strong contributing factor for amount of biomass and the magnitude of this difference.

This research is important because the Canadian Arctic is not well understood as a region, while climate change presents a great risk to humans and the environment alike. The bottom of the food chain—the primary producers—can serve as an indicator for the health of the marine ecosystem and as such we need to know how they will be affected by a changing ice regime. I have no doubt there will be many challenges ahead, but I am confident that it is something that can be accomplished through hard work and the support network I have found here at the University of Manitoba.

Reference:

Piwowar, J., and LeDrew, E. (1995) Hypertemporal analysis of remotely sensed sea-ice data for climate change studies. Progress in Physical Geography 19 pp. 216-242