| Summary: | This project seeks to understand how changing season length, principally winter, affects transportation systems that rely on ice roads in the Northwest Territories, Canada. From this small system, we then seek to generalize the results to an assessment of the impact of seasons on transportation and economic decisions in the North. Most of the project work consisted of riding on the ice roads, discussing their construction and operation with officials, and mining public data archives for climate and socio-economic data. On-site research consisted of visiting Yellowknife twice, along with the outlying communities of Dettah and Wha-Ti. We met with both representatives of the Joint Venture Ice Road (business -- serves the three mines) and the Government of Northwest Territories Ice Roads (government -- serves three native communities) (Fig. 1). We drove on both ice roads twice, once in January 2010 to see their construction, and once in March 2010 to see the finished product just before the road closed. We also conducted a survey about the reasons people use the government ice road between Dettah and Yellowknife and administered the survey by creating a roadblock in conjunction with the Department of Transportation of Government of Northwest Territories. Some images from the field work appear in Figure 2. We did a preliminary estimate of the economic impact of creating the Joint Venture road, as well as an economic impact of the Dettah ice road and its reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. As part of the research we created a weather/snow/ice model based on historical data, allowed for snow plowing in this model, estimated load bearing properties, and estimated failure rates and economic costs based on reasonable estimates and historical data.
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