In Canada’s North, water is life
Real-world applications for Canada1Water
Canada is a famously vast country. For remote jurisdictions with limited resources, coming by accurate data on groundwater, surface water and climate is hard — never mind building models and simulations. Scientists Ryan Connon and Isabelle de Grandpré in the Northwest Territories see a chance for Canada1Water to change that.
BRINGING THE MACKENZIE RIVER BASIN INTO VIEW - A significant portion of the Mackenzie River Basin runs through the Northwest Territories. The basin was the first of the seven Canada1Water watershed domains to be fully simulated in fall 2023.
Q: How would you describe the need for water data and models in the Northwest Territories?
Isabelle de Grandpré: We have very limited groundwater knowledge and capacity in the territory, so any knowledge we can gather is helpful. Honestly, there are some areas where we have no groundwater or surface water information at all. We need to understand where changes are most likely happening so we can set priorities for our work.
Ryan Connon: There are some really key questions to be answered. For instance, the Mackenzie River is a major transportation route. A lot of communities rely on barges and ice roads to bring in fuel and goods. This past summer, water levels got so low that barging stopped. Is that going to become a trend? Permafrost is another example. When it thaws, a huge amount of sediment can move into river networks and choke them up. There are places where that’s already happening. We need better insights into what upcoming periods could look like.
Q: How do you think Canada1Water could help?
Isabelle: It’s important to have information on different scales. The big-picture, continental-scale view Canada1Water provides will help us understand processes that we would not necessarily be able to identify on the more local scale we mainly work with at the Government of the Northwest Territories.
Ryan: For communities and land-use planning boards, any kind of visualization will be huge. And I think the opportunity to have one model as kind of the master baseline will be good for the whole country. Today in Canada we have too many frameworks and it’s hard to keep them all straight. There’s a lot of good work being done, and each model has its own use case, but if we had a common starting point, I think we’d see a lot more consistency.
Q: Are there opportunities for Canada1Water to improve the accuracy of those various modelling efforts?
“We need to understand where changes are most likely happening so we can set priorities for our work.””
Ryan: Definitely. The way I want to see model development move here in the Territories is toward building model-agnostic frameworks first with common forcing datasets. It’s easier to run intercomparison studies if you have good, reliable forcing data in a common file structure. So again, if something like Canada1Water can provide that common structure, the foundation, everyone will benefit.
Isabelle: I also think it could be really useful to compare the raw data in Canada1Water with the information we do have in our models, or to add new information to our databases from the datasets that Canada1Water will be making available.
Ryan: At the end of the day, the more data we have, the better. Because climate change is the biggest factor affecting life in the North today and will be for generations to come. We’re already seeing it. The farther ahead we can project, the better we can prepare our communities.
Isabelle de Grandpré is a hydrogeologist; Ryan Connon is a hydrologist and data modeller. Both work for the Government of the Northwest Territories.