Canada’s northernmost civilian research station has gotten a reprieve. On 8 November the Canadian government promised up to Can$1.6 million ($1.3 million) to the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), which had faced final shutdown in June 2018.
Two federal agencies came to the rescue. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) will chip in about a third of the total amount, which will go to research and networking, and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) will pony up the rest to cover operations. The eleventh-hour funding will keep the lights on at the Arctic observatory, which is located at 80° N latitude on Ellesmere Island, through fall 2019. (The Dr. Neil Trivett Global Atmosphere Watch Observatory, 480 km north of PEARL, is a civilian station run by ECCC, though some of its logistics are handled by a co-located military base.) By that time, researchers hope, they will have secured more stable funding. “Working out a longer-term solution seems to be the government’s intention,” says PEARL principal investigator James Drummond, an atmospheric physicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
PEARL is the oldest and most visible of seven Canadian projects currently supported by NSERC’s climate change and atmospheric research (CCAR) program, which was not renewed in the country’s budget earlier this year (see Physics Today, September 2017, page 28). So far, only PEARL is being rescued.
The government turnaround may have been aided by the not-for-profit Evidence for Democracy. In September the organization launched Save PEARL, an online campaign that garnered more than 2000 emails urging the government to fund the observatory.
Time-series data related to climate change were most at stake by PEARL’s potential shutdown. “Continuity is important,” says Drummond. “You can’t fill in missing data. Gaps are fraught.” PEARL instruments gather data on aerosols, atmospheric composition, cloud coverage and composition, winds, and other atmospheric parameters. “When something unusual happens, you have to be on the ground to see it,” he says. “And if you shut an Arctic station, it’s a major operation to bring it back up.”
Drummond says saving PEARL is a step in the right direction, but adds that “we still have a ways to go to set things totally right.” The six CCAR projects still slated for shutdown focus on aerosols and their impacts; biogeochemical tracers in the Arctic Ocean; sea ice and snow cover; weather prediction and climate projection; changes to land, water, and climate; and exchanges between the ocean and atmosphere.
The CCAR scientists are lobbying the government for the chance to compete for funding in their areas of study. University of Toronto physicist Paul Kushner, principal investigator of the Canadian Sea Ice and Snow Evolution Network, is disheartened. “It appears that the opportunity for new fundamental projects addressing policy-relevant climate science is now terminated in this country,” he says. “What does this imply for climate research in places with a less accommodating perspective on this area of science?”
Kathleen Walsh, Evidence for Democracy policy director, says her organization will keep asking for funding for climate science, including for the CCAR programs. The group’s main mission, she says, is that science in Canada be “well funded, openly communicated, and used in policy.”
Editor’s note, 1 December: A sentence was added to the second paragraph to clarify that there is another Canadian research station located north of PEARL.
