As winters get warmer, questions are emerging about the future of the Rideau Canal Skateway.
The four-year partnership began in January 2022 when the NCC asked a team of Carleton researchers to collect data on the environment and ice growth of the canal, hoping to find solutions to this looming problem.
“The canal itself is a different beast to work with,” said Sam Vamplew, the NCC’s project and skateway co-ordinator. “It’s always a challenge to freeze moving water, and then on top of that, it’s a challenge to freeze dirty water.”
Shawn Kenny, a professor of geomechanics at Carleton, said the research will inform future canal maintenance as winters become warmer. He said the short 2023-24 skating season was a preview of what can be expected in the future.
“It was a very warm winter through December, January and February, but they were able to get the canal open for about 10 days,” Kenny said. “Those temperatures are consistent with what we expect to see as climate normals for 2050 to 2080.”
He said the most extreme effects of climate change, like rising temperatures, will threaten the lifespan of the canal. Even if the warming weather is mitigated, he said skaters can still expect to see changes.
“If we’re in the moderate range to lower-end range, I think it’s viable, but we’d be seeing skating seasons like last year in terms of duration,” Kenny said.
One area the research team is focusing on is how the canal’s ice responds to these expected changes in temperature.
Frederic Brieger, a geography and environmental studies PhD student at Carleton, worked on a weather station set up on the ice surface of Dow’s Lake. The machine records sun radiation and the thickness of snow coverage on the skateway before it is plowed.
“Using weather station data … you can essentially run a computer model and say, ‘with these conditions, we’re expecting an ice growth of so many centimetres,’” Brieger said.
Kenny said snow thickness worsens skating quality because it acts like a blanket, preventing cold air from reaching the ice. To target this issue, the Carleton team created a snow robot.
Kenny compared the robot to a small-scale snowblower. It was created with 3D printing by mechanical engineering students and, if eventually used by the NCC, could be scaled up to the size of a snowmobile.
“We can use that robot to test out the device on the ice so we can understand how the systems work in the cold [and] how the systems work to throw snow,” Kenny said.
Once the data from the small-scale robot is collected, the team can tell the NCC what to expect if it was scaled up and implemented for long-term use, he added. The Carleton team expects to recommend long-term strategies to the NCC by the end of the current research project term in 2026.
Vamplew said the NCC wants to be ready for when warmer winters are the norm, not an anomaly.
“It’s important for us to try to develop all the tools now to continue to have successful seasons – long seasons – and to see what we can do to enhance our operations,” Vamplew said.
“It’s the heart of winter that everybody looks forward to in the city, so our teams take great pride in what we do.”
Featured image provided by Frederic Brieger
