The Canadian GEWEX Program, MAGS

The Canadian GEWEX program, MAGS (MAckenzie Basin GEWEX Study) has been very active in 1997. MAGS currently has two main sources of funding channeled into two main groups, federal government scientists receiving funding from Environment Canada, and university scientists who now have direct grant funding for three years from the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Approval of the NSERC funding during 1996 was a key step in maintaining momentum for the Canadian program. These two groups each include a mix of 15-20 hydrologists and meteorologists working together on either process or modeling studies. MAGS planning is carried out by the Science Committee which now convenes at least once monthly. As part of the global GEWEX program, the goals of MAGS include 'closing' the water budget of the Mackenzie Basin, and ultimately to be able to successfully model processes down to the sub-basin scale on daily to seasonal time scales. For more information on the management structure of MAGS, its goals and implementation plan, participants, data access, and regular updates, readers should visit the MAGS web site at http://www.msc.ec.gc.ca/GEWEX/MAGS.html.

A major MAGS Workshop was held at Saskatoon in late-March with more than 35 presentations, followed by two days of working sessions. Presentations reviewed progress on process and modeling studies during 1996, while the main objectives of the working sessions were to identify gaps in MAGS science, describe critical data gaps, and to modify the enhanced data collection plan to reduce these gaps. Much progress was achieved towards these modest goals, but participants recognize that the program is hard-pressed to fund new field efforts in the chosen data-sparse northern region. There was a general feeling that merger was occurring between hydrological and meteorological studies, and between process and modeling studies. Proceedings of the workshop, including summaries of the working sessions, will be available from the Secretariat later this summer.

GEWEX was also a major focus of the 31st Annual Congress of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), which was also held in Saskatoon on 01-05 June with almost 200 presentations in 43 sessions plus 4 plenaries. The theme of the congress, "energy and water cycles", was appropriate for four GEWEX sessions comprised of 20 presentations, including several from the GCIP and LBA programs. Dr. Gordon McBean provided an overview of MAGS with the GEWEX plenary paper, "A Research Focus on Water and Energy Cycles: the Mackenzie GEWEX Study". Rick Lawford of the IGPO presented two invited papers, one summarizing the challenges that GCIP has encountered in attempting to quantify individual water budget components and closing the water balance for the Mississippi River Basin. This generated some discussion on whether existing radiosonde networks, which only provide twice-daily soundings at 1200 and 0000 UTC, can adequately account for diurnal signatures in summertime moisture budgets without additional daily soundings. Related issues raised in other presentations included the accuracy of stream-flow measures, seasonal differences between P-E computations derived from atmospheric moisture budgets and stream-flow measures during spring break-up, the importance of annual water storage in wetlands, elevated mountain snowpacks, and glaciers, and the accuracy of precipitation measures and evapotranspiration estimates. The number of presentations dealing with the distribution of snow and snowmelt (Marsh, Pietroniro, Smith), stream-flow measurement issues (Prowse, Quinton), new remote sensing techniques (Gibson, Bellon, validation of hydrologic and atmospheric models (Betts, Barr, Strong, Cao, Proctor), and problems of land cover variations (Pietroniro; Radeva), underscored the unique challenges which MAGS has in obtaining reliable data in a data-sparse northern region. These were further emphasized in presentations on the MAGS observational strategy (Kochtubajda et al.) and data management (Crawford). This CMOS Congress was by all accounts a very successful one. Abstracts of scientific presentations can be found at http://ecsask65.innovplace.saskatoon.sk.ca/pages/cmos97/congrs97.html.

The next MAGS workshop will be held in Toronto on 17-19 November. This meeting will focus on the analysis of two historical "water years", 1994-95 and 1995-96, and on finalizing plans for a 14-month enhanced data collection period commencing in July, 1998.

For more information on MAGS activities, visit the web site above, or contact the Secretariat (Geoff Strong) at (306) 975-5809, or via e-mail: Geoff.Strong@ec.gc.ca.