Kluane Lake Research Station (KLRS)
Primary CryoNet Station Information

Kluane Lake Research Station (KLRS) is located in Yukon Territory, Canada, 220 km northwest of the city of Whitehorse. It is a continental site in the foothills of the St. Elias Mountains, the highest mountains in Canada (reaching almost 6000 m). The research station sits on the south shore of Kluane Lake and is adjacent to Kluane National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site. The station is one of the most valued, celebrated, and well-used highlights of the Arctic Institute of North America, a University of Calgary-based Institute which has owned and managed the station since it was founded in 1961.

The extreme elevation difference between Kluane Lake and the crest of the St. Elias Mountains establishes a strong gradient in environmental attributes and results in a remarkable diversity of research opportunities within a small geographical area. This diversity is reflected in the unique scientific legacy of KLRS, which supports research projects spanning the disciplines of glaciology, geomorphology, geology, biology, botany, zoology, hydrology, limnology, climatology, high-altitude physiology, anthropology, and archaeology.

KLRS is a member of the Canadian Network of Northern Research Operators (CNNRO) and the International Network for for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic (INTERACT). Both networks work to build capacity for terrestrial research, to improve collaboration and coordination of efforts, enable access to partner stations, and implement best practices for station management, use and station-based research and monitoring.

Researchers working out of KLRS have made campaign-based meteorological, permafrost, snowpack, and glaciological measurements over many decades, working at different locations in the region, but these data have not been co-ordinated, and they are not necessarily useful to the GCW program as they are intermittent, of unclear quality, and metadata is poorly documented. There is nevertheless a good backbone of knowledge on the regional climate and cryosphere, and its changes, and this can be useful contextually as we move forward to a Kluane CryoNet Site, with the Kluane Lake station serving as the primary/base station. This researcher base will be tapped for assistance in an Arctic-Institute co-ordinated effort to collect systematic regional cryosphere-climate data moving forward. Local to international researchers will benefit from the associated data rescue and the centralized data management and online availability that AINA will contribute to this.

We only established the automatic weather station in summer 2015, after decades of intermittent and spatially variable weather, snow, and glacier observations. Our AWS and snow monitoring sites are now fixed, but in reality, we are only at the beginning of the commitment to sustained and WMO-quality monitoring.