“This has never been done before”
With C1W reaching the midpoint of its three-year development, Aquanty co-founder Ed Sudicky reflects on the project’s origins, progress — and what’s next.
Q: What’s your ‘in a nutshell’ description of Canada1Water?
“Policymakers need solid scientific insights to make effective decisions for the future, and that’s what Canada1Water will provide.”
ED SUDICKY: Canada1Water will be a state-of-the-art platform for modelling climate, groundwater and surface water interactions across Canada. It’s basically a digital twin of the country’s complete hydrogeologic system, covering more than 10 million square kilometres from the far North to southern Ontario. Users will be able to project water resource scenarios, rainfall cycles and water issues — drought and wildfire risks, agriculture impacts, as well as permafrost changes and more — for the middle and end of this century.
Ed Sudicky is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of Waterloo, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and serves as Aquanty’s Board Chair.
Q: Why is it so important?
ED SUDICKY: Water plays an essential role in human life and societal security. Understanding how climate change affects water resources, food supplies and ecosystem health is vitally important for Canadians and people around the world. Policymakers need solid scientific insights to make effective decisions for the future, and that’s what Canada1Water will provide. To my knowledge, it’s the first comprehensive undertaking of its type not only in Canada but around the world. This has never been done before.
Q: What makes this kind of platform possible today?
ED SUDICKY: Many milestones have led to this point. Creating HydroGeoSphere (HGS) was foundational — Aquanty’s integrated groundwater–surface water simulator. It was my former PhD student, Jeremy Chen, who proved HGS could model groundwater and surface water over the entire Canadian landscape. And obviously we now have the computing power to perform highly sophisticated simulations on affordable workstations, which we didn’t have even 10 years ago. But it’s been a long time coming. The original idea goes back to a 1969 paper by Allan Freeze and R.L. Harlan. They were the first to propose an integrated surface/subsurface water model based on physics.
Q: Canada1Water is now 18 months into its three-year timeframe. What stage of development has it reached?
ED SUDICKY: The platform requires many different models to be integrated: climate, soil, bedrock, lakes, snow. Most of those have been built, and now the team is putting them together in HGS, which will be the engine that drives Canada1Water. There’s still considerable work to be done to tune the models so they can faithfully represent observed water conditions. Once that’s achieved, the platform will be able to model how groundwater and surface water conditions will respond to climate change projections.
Q: What has impressed you most about the team’s accomplishments to date?
ED SUDICKY: I’m especially impressed by how harmoniously everyone has worked together to assemble large datasets over the entire Canadian land mass. Without that, developing credible HGS models wouldn’t be possible. The project team has proved exceptionally skilled at processing massive amounts of data rapidly, and at using advanced algorithms to solve the underlying complex system of mathematical equations. It’s taken the combined scientific skills of every single contributor to get to where we are today.
Q: What impact do you hope Canada1Water will achieve?
ED SUDICKY: The platform will make its results widely available in an easily digestible form so that average Canadians will be able to view the outcomes and risks in their own region. Beyond that, the pan-Canadian datasets that have been assembled will be of tremendous value to many other researchers in academia, government, industry and water management. All the work that’s been done marks a massive advancement in scientific knowledge of the water system and climate change. These are exciting times.