The weather watchers
Local technology is helping Labrador’s Inuit adapt to a warming planet
RIGOLET, NEWFOUNDLAND AND
LABRADOR — Charlie Flowers steers his snowmobile to the top of the hill and squints in the blazing afternoon sun. From up here, he can see the ice rolling out of the mouth of Hamilton Inlet and into the deep blue North Atlantic Ocean.
But Flowers, an Inuit hunter and trapper who has spent most of his life in this former trading post in coastal Labrador, doesn’t need to look that far to see how much his world is changing.
It’s mid-March, and yet it feels like May by local standards.
Up and down the rugged Labrador coast, winter is under siege.
The region is warming at an unprecedented rate, affecting everything from sea ice coverage to snowfall levels to wild fluctuations in the weather.
“It’s kind of scary. What’s it going to be like in another generation’s time?” Flowers asks.
“Before, you pretty much knew what to expect when you went out on the land. But that’s all up in the air these days.”
For centuries, Labrador’s Inuit have passed along information about ice conditions — critical in a place with no roads — by word of mouth.
Now they have an app for that. Flowers is part of a unique
pilot project using technology developed at the University of Guelph, which its creators hope can help Rigolet’s residents better adapt to their warming region, through their smartphones and tablets.
It’s one of many partnerships between Indigenous groups and local universities, particularly Wilfrid Laurier University, that are helping Canada’s northern communities adapt to climate change.
Those behind the eNuk app say it can play an important role in documenting local climate conditions — important information locals rely on to access hunting and fishing sites and remote cabins via snowmobile.
Lately, those frozen lifelines have been increasingly unreliable, which makes it all that more urgent that observations about sudden thaws, dangerous open water or unsafe ice conditions, can be spread quickly.
“I look at it as an extension of word of mouth. This will just do that instantaneously,” Flowers says. “And if you’re recording data over years and years, maybe you can start to pick out patterns, and see how things are changing.”
Climate change has affected everything here, he says.
His mother, retired teacher Sandra Flowers, recalls a time when winter used to arrive months earlier than it does now.
“It used to be we’d put our vehicles away sometimes in October, and we wouldn’t get the truck out again until June. Nowadays, I drive around until after Christmas,” she says.
The eNuk app, developed by Dan Gillis, an associate professor and statistician in the School of Computer Science at the University of Guelph, could help preserve the Inuit way of life in coastal Labrador, Charlie Flowers says.
Eventually, the data it collects will be shared with public health officials, to give them a better understanding of how climate change is affecting things like anxiety and depression in the remote community.
In a few years, researchers hope the project can be expanded to things like gathering census data for the region, and help an underserviced region get things like telephone-based health care.
Putting the app in the hands of Labrador’s Inuit is a natural extension of something they’ve always done, Gillis says.
“They’ve always been stewards of the environment, and watching and learning from their environment in order to survive.”
The only problem is Rigolet, a village of 310 people that clings to the edge of the North Atlantic, is beyond the reach of cellphone reception. That means users of the eNuk app can’t upload their observations about local weather conditions until they get home and connected to Wi-Fi.
To make it work, they’ve had to build an app that’s usable without a conventional internet connection — by relying on a technology that could become a model for internet-starved communities across the North.
By June, Gillis and others hope to establish a meshnet, a decentralized internet network where devices act not only as receivers but transmitters, that will allow for basic connectivity and let users share data in real time.
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Jack Shiwak, the 66-year-old mayor of Rigolet, looks out his window toward Happy ValleyGoose Bay and frowns.
The ice highway that connects his village to the regional hub is about a five- to 10-hour snowmobile ride, depending on conditions.
That frozen trail, across rivers, lakes and salt water bays, is a critical link for his community.
The only other way to leave town is a $450 one-way ticket on a Twin Otter plane, or wait for the ferry that runs in the summer.
Snowmobiles buzz up and down the trail all winter long, connecting people with cheaper groceries, more stores and supplies in the larger community. Travelling to Goose Bay has long been a way of life here, but some of the old routes used for generations are no longer reliable.
Increasingly, Shiwak worries when he knows people — especially youth who don’t yet know how to travel safely on thin ice — are heading out.
“For me, it’s a worry when you hear about people travelling out on the land,” he says.
“Young people don’t know what it was like in the past, they don’t know where it’s going. They could be in trouble.”
Sea ice coverage in coastal Labrador has shrunk by about onethird in the past decade. Milder temperatures have shaved weeks off winter, compared to historical norms, and where ice does form it’s sometimes dangerous and thin. Snowfalls are heavier, the winds are more severe and the land is prone to wild fluctuations in temperature.
Those are all major problems in a place where snow and ice are still part of the rhythm of life. It’s meant traditions like travelling to remote cabins for Easter are increasingly being cancelled because it’s no longer safe, Shiwak says.
“You realize you can’t change it. It’s a strange feeling. But if you don’t adapt, life is not going to be very good for you.”
As spring arrives in coastal Labrador, some people are beginning to feel stuck.
The calendar here has long been marked by changes in the hunting season, but increasingly the weather is stranding people at home.
Flowers says life here is still built on the natural world, and people have long learned to live off the wild buffet Labrador provides. But big changes in how and when they can journey out can be hard for some people to adjust to.
That’s why one of the things the eNuk app records is how the changing weather makes people feel — important for researchers who study links between climate change and mental health.
“It’s almost depressing,” Flowers says. “It feels like you’re trapped here. It’s that connection to the land that you miss.”
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Almost 200 years ago, employees at the Hudson’s Bay trading post on Rigolet’s waterfront were recording daily weather observations in log books.
Those recordings are still preserved as part of a local historical collection, and usually flipped through by tourists dropping in during summer months.
But today, even as Labrador warms faster than almost anywhere in the world, there are still major gaps in the data that scientists rely on to track climate change. That’s partly because of the region’s sheer remoteness, and a lack of modern weather monitoring equipment.
“We’ve known these gaps have existed for a long time, and they’ve only gotten worse,” says Robert Way, a climatologist based in Goose Bay.
“It’s one of the challenges we face in a lot of northern areas ... it’s kind of paradoxical, since climate change impacts every ounce of life here.”
The eNuk app could help fill in some of those blanks as Labrador continues to change. What’s clear is the change has been dramatic — the coastal waters around Labrador have risen by 1.5 to 2 C in a little over a century.
Gillis, who is also co-founder of Farm To Fork — used by Waterloo Region food banks to update donors in real-time on their shortages — said Rigolet’s residents will get to decide for themselves what they want to monitor, from changes in fish populations to the arrival of new kinds of insects brought by milder temperatures.
“The great thing is the entire project is community-led. We go up there and they tell us what they want to do,” Gillis says.
“The community will be able to start making decisions around how they plan to address the problems they’re seeing.”
Hopes for the technology go far beyond documenting changes in the weather. There are even plans to use the app to help youth connect with elders who can teach them about the traditional Inuit way of life.
That cultural link is the most concerning thing for Flowers, as Labrador continues to warm.
“It’s a loss of knowledge,” he says. “How do you pass on knowledge ... when everything is changing so much?”