Climate Change Research Looks to the Past to Predict the Future

Hearing the weather forecast for the coming week helps agricultural producers make decisions about regular farm activities like seeding, spraying, swathing and harvesting. But hearing the weather forecast for the coming decade could conceivably help them with all sorts of major decisions like seeding intentions, rotation patterns and insurance coverage, or perhaps whether to switch sectors altogether between grain, livestock and other agri-business opportunities.

That is the potential benefit of the climate prediction modeling being studied at the Saskatchewan Isotope Laboratory (SIL), located at the University of Saskatchewan.

SIL researchers are using innovative chemical and robotic sampling methods to recover historical environmental records from items such as clams, trees and fish ear stones. This data will then be compiled to create models of temperature, rainfall and snow pack that will hopefully enable scientists to better predict regional climate changes and weather patterns.

The research is expected to lead to the most detailed quantitative climate reconstruction of the western provinces to date. Dr. William Patterson, the director of the SIL, is excited about the work being done.

"If we are able to get a handle on how the weather system evolved over thousands of years and the patterns that have emerged, it can give us a very good understanding of what happened in the past and what may very well happen in the future," he said.

"We are never able to say with absolute certainty what the future will hold, but, through probabilities and percentages, we may, perhaps, be able to determine whether a given period of time is ‘more likely' to be dry, or ‘more likely' to be wet, and those sorts of things."

The findings could have a wide variety of potential applications, including helping agricultural producers and government policy-makers prepare for what may be coming down the road.

"It has applications for the insurance industry, applications for farm subsidies, applications for infrastructure preparedness," Patterson said.

Weather patterns, with their effects on water quality and quantity, also have relevance for municipalities.

In fact, Patterson noted that some U.S. cities along the eastern seaboard have incorporated climate modeling to help them decide whether to stockpile road salt in winters that are expected to be particularly severe with an abundance of precipitation.

"Arguably, there is no issue of greater scientific significance than gaining an understanding of the earth's climate system," he stated. "It is critical to all aspects of human society, and to the health of global and regional ecosystems, that we gain an understanding of past climates to understand and prepare for future climates."

According to Patterson, there is no better place to do that than at the SIL. "We definitely have a world-class facility here," he noted. It is the only one of its kind in Canada, and is recognized globally as a leader in climate record research.

That is one of the factors that encouraged Talisman Energy Inc. to donate $300,000 to the facility recently, an investment that Patterson says will enable SIL researchers to delve deeper into the details of climate variation.

Talisman CEO Dr. Jim Buckee stated, "By unraveling historical climate change, we begin to understand both the natural and unexpected climates that have occurred in the past. The importance of this is not only how it places current changes within normal climate fluctuations, but also its impact on how we should react."

For more information, contact:
Dr. William Patterson, Director
Saskatchewan Isotope Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan
Phone: (306) 966-5691
E-mail: bill.patterson@usask.ca