Winter Sampling

As part of my work with Alberta Environment, I often travel to Milk River at Hwy 880 bridge to collect our monthly long term sample.  It seems that almost every time I go to collect a winter sample in snows the night before.  I don't know what the odds of this happening is, but I am starting to take in personally.  On January 19 of this year, on top of the fresh fallen snow, we (Salina Perry and myself) were seeing all  kinds of distortions in the light because of warm air and cold air mixing.  It made the Sweetgrass Hills look like hoodoos instead.

This year we ran a datasonde under the ice at this site.  A datasonde is a multiprobe insturment that can log Temperature, Dissolved Oxygen, pH, and Conductivity every 15 minutes for weeks at a time.  This is very handy because it would get very cold and lonely trying to do this myself.  We installed an insulated trap door in the ice so that we could access the instument and take water samples without having to open up a large hole in the ice each time.  We installed the instrument a week before Christmas and collected data up until the end of February.  I am still working on the data.