Outdoor Skating, a Joy of Winter in Canada, Feels Effects of Changing Climate
Outdoor ice skating rinks are the hubs of many Canadian communities, the basis of national legends (particularly the backyard rink where Wayne Gretzky learned to play hockey) and the source of some of its best-loved stories (“The Hockey Sweater” by Roch Carrier). Now a study by climate scientists suggests that they may be doomed.
The analysis, led by H. Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Montreal, of 50 years of rink-related climate data shows a steady and rapidly increasing deterioration of rink-friendly weather in most of southern Canada.
“I was surprised that we were able to detect systematic changes over part of the country,” said Matthews, an associate professor who is a member of Concordia’s Global Environmental and Climate Change Center. “In terms of the big picture of climate change, it is early days yet.”
The paper looks backward. But Matthews said that if the trend that has emerged over the last 30 years continues unchecked “there will be zero viable rink flooding days within a few decades.” Some parts of the Canada, he said, may be without rinks within 20 years.
While organized hockey is mainly played on indoor ice in Canada and elsewhere, outdoor rinks are ubiquitous. Montreal, for example, maintains about 250 outdoor rinks. In Ottawa, 247 formal outdoor rinks are mostly cared for by volunteers using municipal equipment.
The study’s findings are of little surprise to some of those volunteers. Sean Simpson shut down a rink he maintains in downtown Ottawa on March 2, which was slightly earlier than usual. But Simpson, a small-business owner, said that increasingly wild temperature fluctuations throughout winters have been challenging.
“The weather we used to get at that beginning and end of the season is all winter long now,” he said. “It’s going to make it way more difficult. You’ll see way less skating days.”
Numerous brief thaws followed by freezing temperatures are a problem for Simpson. The park that houses his rink is near a street lined with bars. Late at night, particularly on the weekends when the ice has melted, he said that many of their customers step onto the ice to test the surface. Their resulting footprints then freeze, creating a skating hazard. It has reached the point that Simpson no longer floods the rink on weekends at night.
About 4.8 miles of the Rideau Canal, which has run through Ottawa since the early 19th century, are cleared and flooded by a federal agency. This winter, the weather allowed only 28 skating days, which approached the record for the shortest season: 26 days, set in 2002. Over the past five years, the canal has been open to skaters an average of 42 days.
A climate change impact study for the National Capital Commission, which maintains the canal skating, conducted by the University of Waterloo in 2005 predicted that the season would begin later by a least week in the next decade.
In a nod to that, Ottawa built a refrigerated rink outside city hall for the winter.
After speaking with various cities and towns, the recent study’s authors, including researchers from McGill University in Montreal, concluded that the initial flooding of a natural rink requires at least three consecutive 24-hour periods with temperatures about 23 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. The study found that since 1951, the number of such periods has declined drastically in all of southern Canada with the exception of some areas near the Atlantic coast.