Doctor Stefan Kienzle (Photo supplied by the University of Lethbridge)

By Justin Goulet

Alberta’s climate the focus of website curated by U of L professors

Jan 7, 2020 | 12:31 PM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – If you’ve ever wanted to see exactly how Alberta’s climate has changed over the years, two University of Lethbridge professors have you covered.

Doctor Stefan Kienzle of the Department of Geography & Environment and Christine Clark with the Department of New Media have curated a website studying just that.

The site can be viewed at www.albertaclimaterecords.com.

“In principal, anyone who goes to the website can find answers to questions about how much certain things have changed. For instance, how much have the winters warmed since the 1950s? By the way, they have warmed by between four and five degrees in the south and up to seven degrees in northern Alberta,” Kienzle told Lethbridge News Now.

He added that not only does the information on the site cover changes in years past, it also looks at projected averages for the future.

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“They can also see what the long-term average is. In science, we call those things ‘climate normals’, so these are 30-year averages,” he said, explaining that someone could see how many days will hit over 30 degrees in their area during a specific timeframe.

“We’re doing a whole bunch of things that we think are meaningful for the general public but also to a whole bunch of specialists, especially farmers and ranchers, foresters and water resources managers, who can then look at the data and make interpretations for their own work.”

Kienzle said from the studies done, they observed that winters are getting shorter and that there is less snowfall than rainfall.

“We had a couple of surprises. One of the surprises that we have is an increase in cold spells. We can really observe that ourselves – last September, when we had a very long cold snap and we had extreme snowfall events,” he said.

“These cold spells are more and more frequent and they are simply a testimony of our climate change and the higher variability that we have, which means we are really getting away from the average summer day or the average fall day and in the summer, it’s either warmer than normal, it’s a heatwave or it’s colder than normal – a cold spell, and it’s rare that we have an average day these days.”

He said it’s fair to ‘expect the unexpected’ when it comes to climate and weather patterns.

CLIMATE VS. WEATHER

Kienzle did clear up some confusion when it comes to the difference between climate and weather.

“Weather is the atmospheric condition at any place at any given moment in time, so a certain temperature, the sunshine or cloudiness, wind and precipitation,” he explained.

“Climate is the 30-year average. Climate is really just a statistic. So, we talk about climate change, of course that means if climate variables are changing, they change really gradually and slowly.”

He said that when there’s a cold summer or a really cold, long winter, that doesn’t mean that “climate change is over”, but it’s just a “regular variation between extremes”.