Canada1Water

Canada’s only national framework for sustainable water resource management

The choices we make about water use today will have health, environmental and economic consequences for generations to come. That includes how we adapt to climate change, which continues to exacerbate droughts, floods, wildfires and extreme weather events across Canada and around the world.

Canada1Water is a first-of-its-kind continental-scale model of Canada’s complete hydrologic system. With projections that reach to the end of the 21st century, it is purpose-built to support informed, sustainable, long-term water management strategies.

Use Cases

Canada1Water is available free of charge to anyone involved in formal or informal research and water-resource decision making. Early users of the model datasets include the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, the International Joint Commission, Statistics Canada, Health Canada, Alberta Parks, WWF-Canada and others. Below are just some of the use cases for the model and its outputs — with more emerging every day.

Agriculture

Securing the food supply

Water management

Infrastructure resilience

Economic statistics

Valuing water resources

Local modelling

High-res nested models

Resource industries

Sustainable strategies

Transboundary watersheds

Cross-border impacts

Water budget forecasting

More accurate estimates

Wildfire management

Predicting risk

Wildlife conservation

Ecologies and habitats

What’s your use case?

If you think Canada1Water could help support your water management decisions, we’d love to hear from you.

Unprecedented scale

Canada1Water is the first science-based physical process model to represent the hydrologic cycle for all of Canada, Baffin Island and U.S. transboundary watersheds — integrating groundwater and surface water as well as climate inputs and effects.

Groundwater is a crucial inclusion. Often under-represented in traditional hydrologic models, it is responsible for a significant proportion of surface water flows, especially in periods of dryness or drought.

Built on dozens of enhanced datasets, Canada1Water provides historical and forward-looking projections to the middle and end of the 21st century for:

  • Water resources — Groundwater and surface water levels, flows and trends.

  • Land surface — Evapotranspiration and potential evapotranspiration, snow depth and density, soil moisture and more.

  • Climate change — Regional simulations of climate patterns including large lake effects for maximum accuracy.

Canada1Water Phase 2

The Canada1Water project entered its second phase in April 2024. It continues to be a shining example of what can be achieved when government, industry and academia come together to take on a critical challenge.

Phase 1: Accelerated R&D

In just three short years — from April 2021 to March 2024 — a multi-disciplinary team co-led by the Geological Survey of Canada and the private water science company Aquanty compiled and refined more than 20 discrete datasets, integrated three numerical engines and filled critical data gaps to build an accurate, continental-scale hydrologic model for Canada.

That work culminated with the launch of the Canada1Water portal and was documented in a comprehensive report that is free to download.

Phase 2: Putting insights to work

With funding to 2029, the second phase of Canada1Water builds on those initial achievements to pursue a set of practical goals that will enhance Canada’s ability to sustainably manage water resources. Currently, those goals include:

  • Developing national groundwater metrics

  • Delivering total water storage metrics based on Gravity Research and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data

  • Partitioning those total water storage metrics to support more accurate groundwater estimates

  • Providing complete water budgets — for both groundwater and surface water — by watershed across Canada

  • Upgrading the Canada1Water infrastructure, including primary input datasets and model verification

Project Partners

Co-Leads

  • Natural Resources Canada

    – Geological Survey of Canada

  • Aquanty Inc.

Funders Phase 1

  • Canadian Safety and Security Program – Defence Research Development Canada

  • Natural Resources Canada

     – Geological Survey of Canada
    –  Canadian Forest Service

  • Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

    – Environmental Change One Health Observatory (ECO2)

  • Aquanty Inc.

  • NSERC support:

     – University of Toronto
    –  University of Waterloo

Funders Phase 2

  • Natural Resources Canada

    – Geological Survey of Canada:
    ○  Environmental Geoscience Program
    ○  GEM-GeoNorth Program
    ○  Critical Minerals Geoscience and Data Initiative (CMGD)

  • Aquanty Inc.

  • NSERC support:

    – University of Alberta
    –  University of Waterloo 
    –  University of Toronto

Collaborators

  • Natural Resources Canada

    – Canadian Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation
    –  Surveyor General Branch
    –  Canadian Forest Service

  • Environment and Climate Change Canada

  • Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Partner with us.

We’re always looking for like-minded organizations to collaborate with and evolve the Canada1Model.