Frazil ice particles form when the river supercools - that means the water temperature actually falls below its freezing point. Supercooling events can last for several hours or even several days, depending on the environmental conditions. Our ability to predict when supercooling events will occur is critical to our ability to predict how and when the river freeze-up process will unfold.

This is very challenging! The river temperature is dependent on many different variables, including air temperature, wind speed, relative humidity, barometric pressure, cloud cover, and incoming and outgoing radiation (including sunlight). These conditions are very site-specific, so data from the nearest meteorological station are not necessarily accurate enough to predict supercooling events on sub-daily timescales. Additionally, some of these factors (such as cloud cover and radiation) are very rarely measured.

Recently, advances have been made in measuring the heat fluxes at play throughout supercooling events, including a study that I completed together with river ice researchers at the University of Manitoba in 2019. In my current research, I am conducting additional field studies on the Pembina and Bow Rivers, comparing the field data to remote sensing data, and developing and evaluating new methods for predicting supercooling events. This includes a very detailed study of the surface and subsurface fluxes affecting a small river during freeze-up. The results of this study will be used to support the further development of numerical river ice models, and to provide a forewarning of supercooling events to the operators of water intakes.

River discharge is especially difficult to measure during freeze-up, when the frazil pan concentration on the water surface gradually increases until a stable ice cover forms. Conventional rating curves fail because ice changes the relationship between water level and discharge, and direct measurement is impossible when ice conditions are unstable. This project investigates how the vertical velocity profile beneath the water surface changes as frazil pan concentration increases, with the goal of enabling discharge estimation from non-contact surface observations such as drone imagery. Laboratory experiments in the T. Blench Hydraulics Laboratory at the University of Alberta will systematically vary pan concentration and flow conditions to establish the key velocity relationships, while field measurements on the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton will test whether these relationships hold under natural freeze-up period. The project will produce the first continuous physical relationship between observable surface ice conditions and river discharge during freeze-up, filling a critical gap in winter hydrometric records across Canada's cold regions.

Description coming soon.

Description coming soon.

What are the consequences associated with the hypothetical failure of a dam? This is a very important question, and in order to answer it we need to be able to estimate how quickly the water contained behind a dam would be released in the event of a breach. This allows us to map out the region that would be flooded by the released water, calculate the maximum flow depths and velocities in the flood zone, and estimate the potential risks to people, property, and the environment in the inundated area.

According to the Alberta Dam and Canal Safety Directive (2018) and Alberta Water Act: Water (Ministerial) Regulation (2021), certain safety regulations must be applied to any dams (even small very small dams) which have certain consequences associated with their failure. The issue is that the existing equations for estimating the flow rate of water resulting from an embankment dam breach have been developed for very large structures. Therefore, these equations may not be appropriate for the analysis of small dams.

This project is focussed on assessing the applicability of existing dam breach equations for small dams, comparing the variations in the consequences of failure estimated using different equations, developing a new equation specifically for small dams, and providing practical recommendations for engineers conducting small dam consequence classifications.