Lake Futures Webinar Series: Subwatershed-based lake and river routing products for hydrologic and land surface models applied over Canada

Wednesday, September 9, 2020 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)
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This series will be an opportunity for the non-academic community to engage with Lake Futures researchers, as they share their latest research findings and discuss implications for water policies, programs, and plans in Ontario. 

Webinars will be offered weekly, on Wednesdays from 1:00-2:00 p.m. EDT. Webinars will include a 30-minute presentation, followed by a 30-minute discussion period.

Subwatershed-based lake and river routing products for hydrologic and land surface models applied over Canada

Presented by Bryan Tolson, Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering 

Bryan Tolson

Lakes and reservoirs have important impacts on hydrological and biogeochemical functions of a landscape but are often overlooked in regional hydrological models. This is important in Canada where we have a huge number of lakes. In this webinar, Bryan Tolson, will share recent work of Han et al. (2020) deriving a suite of Pan-Canadian subwatershed-based lake and river routing GIS products at multiple spatial resolutions. These publicly available data products supply all the necessary hydrologic routing model inputs. All Water Survey of Canada streamflow gauging stations are used to define subwatershed outlets in the products. The routing product is used to inform a hydrologic routing model in the Raven hydrologic modelling framework, and is the first demonstration of Raven in routing-only mode. The Hudson Bay drainage basin (40% of Canada), including more than 20,000 river reaches and 10,000 lakes, will be simulated as a case study. A corresponding GIS lake and river routing toolbox under development will also be highlighted that puts the watershed and lake discretization decisions into the modeller’s hands instead of relying solely on the small set of products in Han et al. (2020).

Ming Han, Juliane Mai, Bryan A. Tolson, James R. Craig, Etienne Gaborit,
Hongli Liu & Konhee Lee (2020): Subwatershed-based lake and river routing products for
hydrologic and land surface models applied over Canada, Canadian Water Resources Journal /
Revue canadienne des ressources hydriques, DOI: 10.1080/07011784.2020.1772116

View other webinars in this series