Bringing the future into focus
Realizing the Canada1Water vision
As Canada1Water’s inaugural simulation results come in, Steve Frey of Aquanty says early signs already point to some potentially big groundwater changes for certain parts of the country.
A FIRST LOOK AT C1W MODEL RESULTS - The Mackenzie River Basin is the first watershed to generate simulation results in C1W.
Late in fall 2023, after months of data assembly, problem-solving, gap-filling, bias correction, integration and calibration, the first of seven watershed domain models — the Mackenzie River Basin — ran through Aquanty’s HydroGeoSphere™ simulation engine to generate Canada1Water’s first long-range projections.
“We really didn’t know what to expect,” says Frey. “What we’re seeing is the suggestion of a pretty clear story in the northwest: wetter winters, drier summers, and an overall drop in stored groundwater by the end of the century.”
The results establish a trendline through the middle and end of the 21st century that has the Mackenzie domain becoming wetter in winter and early spring, with liquid water flows rising sharply. So why the drop in groundwater storage? Even with extra water in the system, summers could be drier than they are today, and evapotranspiration — the amount of moisture cycling back into the atmosphere — is also on the rise.
The model shows potential evapotranspiration (PET) starting earlier in the year and maxing out at higher than historic levels over time. PET is a projection of how much evapotranspiration could occur if enough water were present. Actual evapotranspiration (AET) is already seen to be climbing based on real-world available water supplies.
“It basically means less water is staying in the system over time, which is why the projected groundwater levels eventually go down.” says Frey.
MORE FINE-TUNING TO DO
“What we’re seeing is the suggestion of a pretty clear story in the northwest: wetter winters, drier summers, and an overall drop in stored groundwater by the end of the century.”
Frey is quick to point out these early projections are not the last word. “We’re looking at monthly normal outputs like AET, river flow rates, surface water storage, soil storage and the subsurface, but we haven’t done the exchange fluxes between the subsurface and the land surface, and the liquid water forcing right now is aggregated across the entire basin, which isn’t exactly accurate,” he explains.
Steve Frey is the director of research services at Aquanty and co-lead of the C1W project.
Frey also notes that the model may currently have too much water in the Mackenzie River delta because it is so low-lying.
While the specific data points will evolve, the trends identified for the northwest seem fairly clear.
“What we’re looking at is future climatology and related hydrologic trends — not weather, and not extreme events — but these kinds of base trends should give decisionmakers time to come up with solutions for regions that can expect groundwater shortfalls in the decades to come,” Frey says.
With ongoing manual calibration, the simulation results will become even more precise before the R&D phase of the project wraps up in March 2024.
“We’re going to be refining our spatial outputs to get down to the sub-basin level,” Frey says. “Not just for Mackenzie but right across the country. We want to get to a scale that supports regional assessments.”