Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 08/01) - If you were out on Long Lake this summer you might have noticed a pair of boaters taking part in something oddly unrecreational.

With a large sail-like device rising out from the middle of their zodiac watercraft, they paint a rather strange picture floating around Yellowknife's premier aquatic play zone.

In reality, Devon Worth and Claire Oswald are a pair of graduate students studying climatology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

"You get a lot of 'what fors?'and mixed reactions," says Worth, referring to the device -- called a pyranometer -- that he uses to read light measurements in the water.

"One person thought I was fishing for something big, because it has a big cross arm on it."

Both students belong to a project called the Global Energy and Water Experiment.

According to Worth, climatologists are particularly interested in the Northwest Territories -- especially the Mackenzie Valley -- because it appears to be warming up faster than any other area in North America.

Worth has spent the summer measuring light intensity in Long Lake, among others, to find out how much of it is absorbed into the water. He is hoping that his collected data will someday help determine whether solar radiation in the North is rising.

Oswald's task is to find out how much climate change is affecting evaporation levels on NWT lakes.

She has spent the summer monitoring four nearby lakes, including Great Slave, with climate towers that measure such meteorological phenomenon as wind speed, temperature, humidity and wind direction. These factors all figure into water evaporation.

"There's tons of lakes in the Mackenzie Valley, and what I'm trying to do is determine how much evaporation is coming off these lakes, so we could get a better understanding of how climate change is affecting lake levels in the North," says Oswald. Worth says taking part in the project requires mulling through plenty of down time, but he hopes in the end their findings will someday be useful to other climatologists.

"It's kind of dull, there's a lot of repetition," says Worth.

"But this is what I like the most. I get to spend my summers outdoors and go to places like Yellowknife."