The Canada1Water ‘value add’ – datasets
Eric Kessel is a hydrogeologist at Aquanty responsible for homogenizing Canada1Water’s provincial/territorial and watershed-scale datasets for use in hydrological models.
Even before Canada1Water’s hydrologic simulation goes live, the project will deliver value to decisionmakers and researchers by making its datasets publicly available. Hydrogeologist Eric Kessel gives a preview of what’s to come, starting with a highly anticipated data product this summer.
In its development to date, Canada1Water has generated bedrock, surficial geology and soil maps with hydrological parameterizations; 3D triangular element meshes from a new digital terrain model; climate forcing data from historical and future climate projections — and numerous other datasets. Most will be publicly available by the time the project is completed, along with simulation output data on water fluxes, distribution of hydraulic heads, and a full inventory of modelled water indices.
“Anyone researching water resources can use these datasets at no cost,” Kessel says. “We know they will be a huge aid to policy makers and other decisionmakers who are tasked with planning — and preparing for — the future of Canadian communities.”
First up, NHN
The National Hydrographic Network (NHN) is a geospatial data product from Natural Resources Canada that describes the country’s inland surface waters and provides base data for a wide range of applications. Many of its stream flows are disconnected or contain errors due to provincially and territorially regionalized data collection, which doesn’t reflect how streams occur in nature and is not suitable for a comprehensive nationwide model.
“People keep telling us they’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
That’s been corrected by the Canada1Water team, which reprocessed the NHN data and also attributed stream orders across Canada, designating each stream by relative size using the Strahler Stream Order scale.
“Our enhancements ensure that stream orders are assigned continuously with a standardized network density across all sub-watershed boundaries,” Kessel explains. “We needed to do this to manage the resolution of our model by systematically removing lower-order streams. Now researchers anywhere will be able to do the same and have greater control when they work with NHN data.”
These improvements to the NHN datasets were presented at conferences in 2022 and promoted through Canada1Water communication channels — receiving an enthusiastic response from researchers. “People keep telling us they’ve been waiting a long time for this product,” says Kessel.
Preparing data for prime time
Datasets are not born ready for public consumption. At a minimum, quality metadata and data assembly documentation need to be produced. Canada1Water is using a geospatial metadata standard, which requires who, what, where, when, why and how details for each dataset. For each dataset — as was the case with NHN — an independent prepublication review is required.
All Canada1Water datasets will be released in the Geological Survey of Canada open file format on the NRCAN Geoscan platform. Some input datasets, such as the NHN, will be available via early release. Aquanty will also share access to the publication Open Files through its own data platform.
EXPANDING THE CONTINENTAL PICTURE - C1W’s improved NHN Network Linear Flow stream dataset assigns Strahler Stream Order to more than 1,300 sub-watersheds in Canada. Joining that to the National Hydrography Dataset Plus of the U.S. Geological Survey completes stream order coverage for North America. This enhanced C1W dataset is already being used by water researchers in Canada and the United States.