NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Objective(s): To address the overarching question: what large scale weather patterns can adversely impact sealift activities and marine transport in the Eastern Beaufort Sea region?

Project Description: This project will address the overarching question: what large scale weather patterns can adversely impact sealift activities and marine transport in the Eastern Beaufort Sea region? Previous work has not tended to directly link impacts to their causal weather events. This project targets the question of impactful weather events as they affect end-users: coastal communities, industrial/marine shipping and emergency response operators in this region by identifying the primary weather patterns that bring problems and by improving end-users’ access to information that could assist their operations. “Information” refers to data about the coastal environmental state that has been translated into a format and presented at a time-scale that is of immediate relevance to an end-user. Visits to the Northwest Territories communities of Tuktoyaktuk and Ulukhaktok will be take several days and are intended to engage the hamlet, small-scale sealift transportation and large vessel operators and planning managers. At-large community engagement, if desired by the community, will be undertaken. The sampling will take place in consultation with working contacts in the communities and with the Inuit Research Advisor of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. Project activities will center around two main tasks: 1) direct measurement, modeling, or calculation of parameters which are known to exert impacts on operations: occurrences of large swell, waves, and winds, and coastal wave energy totals; and 2) development of information tools that more accurately target end-user need; specifically, via working with community planners, industry partners, and marine transportation managers to identify and develop additional analysis needs for specific weather events that they deem impactful, and ways to present existing data (e.g. from Environment Canada) in formats more suitable to their needs. Analyses would be undertaken by research teams. Local involvement will take place via the following: Community visits: Three visits to each of two communities – Tuktoyaktuk and Ulukhaktok – are planned, one per year. Year One: conduct community consultation in a “bottom-up” approach involving Hamlets, Community Corporations, planners, and industrial operators. Interviews will take place to identify specific weather and marine related hazards or impacts. A reporting system would also be established, whereby the timing of impactful events is recorded and related back to project PIs. This local and site-specific knowledge will provide direction to the project, including types of analyses required and the end-user information and training required. A visit in year two will assess strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach and will allow for project refinements to be implemented. During a final visit in year three, results will be presented to the community so that community members can share reflections of project strengths and weaknesses and consider means of maintaining project continuity beyond the project timeframe. There will be a web-based swell/wave near-real-time display system for end-users. Presentations from results of analysis on worst-case wave and weather analysis will be made to the community. Training will be provided for end-users on the information products and weather pattern analysis using existing products as provided by Environment Canada. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from February 17, 2014 to December 31, 2014.