NRCAN Webinar Series Feature – Canada1Water Overview: A National-scale Hydroclimatological Modelling Initiative For Climate Change Impact Analysis
Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) and the Canadian Water Resources Association (CWRA) recently collaborated to highlight the groundbreaking Canada1Water (C1W) initiative. This initiative - an interdisciplinary project led by NRCan and Aquanty Inc. - aims to simulate the impact of climate change on Canada's water resources to the end of century using advanced modelling and forecasting techniques.
Dr. Steve Frey (Director of Research Services at Aquanty Inc.) was invited to present a webinar on the C1W initiative as part of the CWRA's webinar series. This webinar provided a platform to discuss the significance of the C1W project and its potential implications for water resource management in Canada, as well as an overview of the C1W model and dataset development, and how to access project data/deliverables through the soon to launch C1W Data Portal.
Webinar Overview:
Assessing the impact of climate change on Canada’s water resources requires a national solution that considers both groundwater (GW) and surface water (SW). The Canada1Water (C1W) initiative addresses this need through the use of HydroGeoSphere (HGS) fully-integrated GW-SW models that collectively provide complete coverage for drainage basins over continental Canada and Baffin Island.
In addition to HGS, C1W is utilizing regional climate modelling conducted with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF 4.3) model and land surface modelling conducted with the Community Land Model (CLM 5) to generate future climate projection ensembles and thermal regimes for the GW-SW models. Results from C1W will help quantify changes in surface and subsurface hydrologic conditions at mid- and end-century time frames under an ensemble of climate projections. C1W model data sets and model outputs will be published under an OpenGovernment Data licence.