Arctic Lake Monitoring System Deployed for Another Winter Season

AXYS field technicians recently traveled to Inuvik, Canada to assist in the servicing and deployment of the system. The Arctic Lake Monitoring System (ALMS) from AXYS Technologies (Canada) was originally deployed by helicopter in September 2010 and successfully gathered data throughout the winter season of ice formation and break-up transition periods. It was removed from the water in September 2011 for routine maintenance and refurbishment to prepare it for another season of arctic environmental monitoring. Although coordinating field work in the Arctic Circle has its share of challenges, the AXYS field technicians and W-CIRC personnel successfully commissioned and redeployed the ALMS in Noell Lake for another season of data acquisition.

The information collected will help to develop a better understanding of Arctic lake ecosystems and will assist in the development of hydro-ecological models for small arctic lakes in research disciplines including, landscape hydrology and geochemistry, lake-ice modeling and aquatic productivity and carbon dynamics. Such models are used to assess the vulnerability of Arctic lake ecosystems to disturbance, such as climate variability/change and those related to Canada’s northern region.

AXYS and the Water & Climate Impacts Research Centre (W-CIRC), a collaborative Environment Canada and Department of Geography (University of Victoria) research centre, designed the ALMS to be an autonomous system used for continuous year-round monitoring of hydro-ecology in Arctic lakes.

The ALMS, consisting of Ice Buoy and Subsurface Smart Mooring, performs continuous, unattended year-round monitoring of meteorological conditions, ice cover, solar radiation and water quality on and throughout the water column. This information is available in real-time to W-CIRC throughout the year.

Data from the subsurface mooring is transmitted to the buoy via an acoustic modem where all system data is then combined and sent out through cellular or satellite telemetry. AXYS provides data hosting, management and reporting services for W-CIRC to help them collect, track, analyse, and understand their data.

The Water & Climate Impacts Research Centre (W-CIRC) was established in September 2002 at the University of Victoria (UVic) as part of a co-location agreement between UVic and the National Water Research Institute (NWRI) of Environment Canada.