Finance committee  No, I don't believe so. First, there's quite a disparity in location. Cambridge Bay is at approximately 69° north; Pearl is at 80° north. That separation is equivalent to the distance from Toronto to Memphis. You wouldn't tell me that the atmosphere is the same over the two of those.

Finance committee  No. We have a very advanced group of instruments. In fact, in the Arctic we use the same lab quality instruments that the top research labs in atmospheric science around the world use. We're as close to the cutting edge as we can be on that. I don't think CHARS is going to have any of those.

Finance committee  We're really the only lab outfitted the way we are that far north in the world. There are a couple of labs that are further north, one of them in Alert, but really there's nothing else in the world that does the level of work that we do. We lose sight of what's happening inside the polar vortex, for example, which visits the area over northern Ellesmere Island quite frequently.

Finance committee  We are involved primarily in measuring atmospheric composition, and that has very important impacts on both global climate change and severe weather. The ozone layer, for example, is the primary engine of the atmosphere. It is where most of the energy goes in, so understanding what it's doing is of great importance.

Finance committee  As scientists, we'd like to think it's very important. You can't go back and measure yesterday's atmosphere, so the first question is: how long is the data record to which you're referring? We at PEARL have been measuring various atmospheric parameters since 2005. Before us, it was Environment Canada, through Astro back to 1993, and before that through the Eureka weather station back to 1947.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Pierre Fogal, a senior research associate with the physics department at the University of Toronto, and I serve as site manager of the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory—usually called PEARL. I'm talking to you today in reference to the Canadian High Arctic Research Station, but we have little specific knowledge of that, as it is an entirely new entity that has yet to take its place among the working research stations of the Canadian Arctic.