Canada1Water in an Ontario Context: Fully Integrated Groundwater - Surface Water Modelling for Canadian Sustainability Goals
The Ontario Groundwater Geoscience 2024 Open House was held on February 27 (in-person) and February 29 (virtual). Steve Frey, the Director of Research Services at Aquanty Inc. gave a presentation about Canada1Water titled “Canada1Water in an Ontario Context: Fully Integrated Groundwater - Surface Water Modelling for Canadian Sustainability Goals”.
Abstract:
As highlighted in the 2019 report titled “Canada’s Changing Climate” (Bush and Lemmen 2019), there is a need to improve our understanding of groundwater–surface water (GW–SW) availability across Canada, from the perspective of both present-day inventory, and future climate implications. Canada1Water (C1W) is addressing this shortcoming through national-scale hydro-climatological modelling and analysis for historic, mid-century, and end-century time periods. The C1W modelling framework consists of climate, land-surface, and fully integrated GW–SW water modelling. To facilitate adequate resolution in the GW–SW modelling, continental Canada has been divided into 7 major drainage basin-based model domains, of which the Atlantic–Great Lakes, the Hudson Bay, and the Nelson basins all have coverage within Ontario. Although C1W only began in 2020, there have been a number of derivative projects that have leveraged C1W data sets, models, and resources. These include GW–SW model validation in southern Ontario, GW resource valuation in South Nation watershed, wetland and climate sensitivity analysis in northern Ontario, and flow and transport modeling in the Rainy River–Lake of the Woods watershed in northwestern Ontario. C1W provides the full suite of data necessary to assemble, parameterize, and run fully integrated GW–SW models anywhere in the province and, while some data are best suited for regional scale analysis (i.e., hydrostratigraphy), other data can facilitate small-scale high fidelity nested modeling (i.e., landcover, surface water geometry, the combined terrain/bathymetry surface, and the soils data). Additionally, the climatological forcing data (snow melt, rainfall, and potential evapotranspiration) for historic, mid-century, and end-century simulations is also part of the C1W data package. In this presentation, results from the Ontario focused C1W basin-scale GW–SW simulations will be presented, along with an overview of how end users can access the C1W data sets and models using the public data portal.