Canada1Water: 2022 Progress Report
“Canada1Water will be one of the most sophisticated models of a continental hydrologic system ever produced.”
The Canada1Water project has reached the midpoint of its three-year project . The Canada1Water team has made significant progress in building a world-first physics-based platform for modelling climate, surface water and groundwater interactions across Canada. This progress report contains a summary of research carried out to date. Once completed the Canada1Water platform will allow users to track the evolution of surface water and groundwater flows backward and forward in time - from 1979 through to the year 2100. This progress report covers model development updates as well as an engagement and outreach section. The Canada1Water project involves many different steps to assemble datasets and calibrate the model. Here are the modelling updates that were highlighted in the report, check out the whole report to find out more!
Access the full report here.
Update: Future climate modelling
Canada1Water aims to produce dynamically downscaled climate modelling outputs based on the popular, state-of-the-art Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) software. These outputs will accurately represent natural systems, and model results will be publicly available through open-access licences. As of December 2022, the C1W team had developed tools for using WRF at an initial resolution of 22 km2, working toward an ultimate resolution of 11 km2.
Update: Historical climate data and land surface modelling
Climate data for C1W is provided by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS), the University of Waterloo,
the University of Toronto and Aquanty. The CFS team has developed and completed the quality assurance process for key historic North American climate station measurements, specifically daily data for minimum and maximum daily temperatures and total precipitation.
Update: Hydrostratigraphic modelling
Canada1Water has developed a conceptual hydrostratigraphic model for subsurface layers in each of the seven drainage domains. These layers reside between the ground surface (defined by
a digital elevation model) and 100 metres below sea level, and include two soil layers, two or three surficial geology layers, and three bedrock layers. Each of those sub-layers is defined by an elevation map, a material zone distribution map, and a material properties file for each zone.
Canada1Water will model the continental water cycle across seven regional drainage domains including Baffin Island. The project is approaching its halfway point, in the model spin-up stage.
Update: Soil maps, bedrock outcrops and peatlands
Across the seven regional drainage domains defined for C1W, the first metre of the hydrostratigraphic model may consist of bedrock, mineral and organic soils, or peatland. The soils have two sublayers (zero to 50 cm and 50 to 100 cm) requiring detailed assignments of hydraulic properties such as residual and saturated water content, van Genuchten parameters, and saturated hydraulic conductivity. This has been accomplished by using the pedotransfer Rosetta v3 to process mineral soil textures and properties from various machine learning soil maps.
Update: HydroGeoSphere mesh assembly and model spin up
Unstructured 3D finite element meshes are needed to model fluid flows in the seven drainage
domains. By December 2022, a coarse mesh (1–5 km edge length) with Strahler fifth-order and higher-order streams had been constructed for each domain with higher resolution in areas of interest such as streams, wells and lakes. Work is underway to produce higher-resolution meshes (0.5 –1 km edge length) to support more refined modelling of watershed hydrology with Strahler fourth-order and higher order streams.
“Water is an irreplaceable necessity for human life — and directly affected by climate change, with long-term consequences for everything from food and energy supplies to ecosystem health. Canada1Water (C1W) will give decisionmakers the sound scientific information they need to prepare climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies for Canadian communities.”