Northern Lakes as Sentinels of Environmental Changes

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High latitude cold regions, including northern areas of Canada, are warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with the greatest warming occurring during the winter, which significantly impact northern freshwater lake ecosystems. Changing winter conditions are among the greatest threats to northern lakes, which represent vast reserves of freshwater and biodiversity, and provide key provisioning and cultural ecosystem services to local communities. Inadequate observations or data, especially at high latitudes, is a major issue that hinder creating an action plan to address this threat. The proposed project will use remote sensing to narrow the knowledge and data gaps about the recent and ongoing trends in changing regimes of northern lakes under climate warming using remote sensing and a coupled climate model. We aim to work on a coupled system of lake surface-atmosphere interaction to help improving the understanding of key lake-ice-atmosphere interaction processes. This will resolve more detailed local features, and produce future projections of regional climate change to improve our estimation of the regional impacts of climate change for better decision-making. We will therefore combine remote sensing data with the acquisition of ground-based data using Canadian Regional Climate Model-Nucleus for European Modeling of the Ocean (CRCM-NEMO) model. The project will generate new insights into lake surface-atmosphere interactions in cold regions and provide baseline data in support of climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. This project will bring together university researchers with government scientists and Déline communities, with a focus on Great Bear Lake (GBL) in the Mackenzie River Basin, Northwest Territories. In 2017, UNESCO recognized the Déline's exemplary approach to sustainable development by designating GBL and its watershed within the Déline District an international biosphere reserve. This project will contribute to a comprehensive research and monitoring program for the Tsá Tué biosphere reserve and yield science-based information to guide the preservation of the ecological and cultural integrity of the GBL basin. We envision that GBL will become a key reference site for the calibration and validation of satellite algorithms that can be applied across the Arctic.