Canada1Water
Evaluating climate change impacts on ground/surface water sustainability across continental Canada
An ambitious initiative to place water resources modelling and decision support tools in reach of all Canadians.
A continental scale framework will be available to support a decision support system (DSS) that can support community-based information dissemination and interrogation. The modelling of groundwater-surface-water will be based on the HydroGeoSphere platform. The online DSS platform will provide a window to the model results and provide information accessible to the nontechnical user at public, community, watershed management level, and higher governmental levels.
Illustrative outputs through the DSS are climate change impacts to Canadian water resources (surface water and groundwater), including how flood and drought frequency may potentially change, for mid- and end-century time intervals.
Basin Scale Models Across Continental Canada
A fully integrated surface/groundwater model for all of continental Canada (Canada Continental Scale Model – CCSM) was initiated in 2009 using HydroGeoSphere (HGS). The first version of the CCSM was completed in 2020 (read more here). It demonstrated large-scale ground/surface water interactions and water balances, including regions in Canada’s far north; where hydrologic monitoring data is extremely sparse, and yet where climate change impacts are anticipated to be most severe.
The Canada1Water model will build upon lessons learned and integrate the CCSM with the latest climate projections to give all Canadians a window into the future of climate change impacts on our collective water resources.
Climate Change Integration
The Canada1Water project will couple a state-of-the-art modeling framework with high-resolution climate projection data to produce a Canadian continental-scale assessment of projected climate change impacts on surface and groundwater resources. A first assessment will be based on available regional climate projections from the CORDEX archive. Furthermore, additional regional climate projections will be generated in collaboration with the University of Toronto, using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. This will further expand the ensemble of future climate scenarios, while also taking advantage of recent advancements in the understanding of global and regional climate dynamics.
Coupling of the WRF model to HGS has been demonstrated to provide predictive insight on the response of groundwater, soil moisture, and surface water to climate change.
Decision Support Structure (DSS)
In 2015, Aquanty initiated the development of a real-time web-platform (HGSRT) that employs a user-friendly portal to disseminate HGS simulation results into the hands of users. HGSRT has been operational in the South Nation Watershed (located south of Ottawa) since January 2018 with positive feedback from users. Recently, HGSRT has been expanded to include all of Southern Ontario. Aquanty will deploy the HGSRT platform for Canada1Water.
The DSS will provide a computational low-cost window to the model results and provide information to nontechnical users and watershed managers across Canada.
Data Distribution and Access
The project hopes to stimulate integrated groundwater-surface-water modelling by releasing the consolidated and vetted supporting datasets, where feasible, for reuse by other modellers in academia, government, and private sector. Stay tuned regarding data releases.
As the project advances data inputs and outputs will be published under an open government of Canada license.
“Canada1Water represents a truly 21st century advancement in integrated climate-surface-groundwater modelling capabilities to assess water resource vulnerabilities across the Canadian landscape. Not only within Canada, but it lays out a science-based roadmap for scientific communities and government agencies around the globe.”
— Dr. Edward Sudicky, FCAE, FRSC
Contact
Feel free to contact the primary collaborators on this project with any questions.
Aquanty
Steve Frey - Aquanty Project Lead
Natural Resources Canada
Hazen Russell - GSC Project Lead
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
David Lapen - AAFC Project Lead
Email the Aquanty team (info@aquanty.com) to learn more about Canada1Water.