A Waterloo Engineering researcher is expanding a long-running partnership with the province to help Ontario improve predictions of floods and droughts and further inform water management in lakes and rivers across the province.
Dr. Bryan Tolson, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has received $540,000 over three years from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources for the Ontario Hydrologic Modelling Assessment project. Mike Harris, Ontario’s minister of natural resources and the MPP for Kitchener-Conestoga, announced the funding at the University of Waterloo on October 30. The research will provide water resources decision-makers across the province with additional information to prepare for flooding and improve dam operations.
Tolson compares his work to a weather forecast for Ontario’s rivers and lakes. This is his second major research agreement with the ministry. Through the first, a four-year, $494,500 agreement, his team built the Ontario Hydrologic Modelling System, a computer model that tracks how rain and snow move through soil, wetlands, rivers and lakes across the entire province. To build it, the team mapped Ontario’s lake and river network, including more than 80,000 lakes, and estimated how the province’s thousands of dams affect streamflow. The work also produced the Ontario Hydrologic Atlas and other provincial datasets, all of which will be made publicly available to water managers and practitioners across the province.
From left to right: Dean Mary Wells, Dr. Bryan Tolson, Minister Mike Harris and Dr. Bill Rosehart
The new funding supports version 2.0 of the modelling system. The team will adapt it to forecast floods and show how it can guide decisions on how much water to hold back or release in managed watersheds. For example, the team is collaborating with the MNR to apply the model with water management inputs in the heavily managed Muskoka watershed.
The models are built on Raven, open-source hydrologic modelling software developed at Waterloo over nearly 20 years by Dr. James Craig, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-investigator on both MNR grants. Raven is used across Canada for operational streamflow forecasting. Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars work alongside ministry scientists and engineers to build and test the models on real watersheds and water management problems.
“We are taking proactive steps to be better prepared, so that when flooding happens, we can reduce its impacts,” said Harris.
“Better models and improved forecasts of floods can give communities more time to prepare and help the province manage its dams to balance competing demands on Ontario’s rivers and lakes,” said Tolson.
Learn more about Tolson’s research,the Raven Hydrological Modelling Framework and some available project output datasets: OLRRPv2 website and SAI paper.