Master of Applied Science (MASc) and Collaborative Water Program student Genevieve Brown from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was honoured as the recipient of the Professor Bill Stolte Student Paper Award at the 2019 Canadian Water Resources Association Annual meeting in Collingwood, ON May 26-31, 2019.
Her paper, entitled “Multi-gauge calibration of a hydrological model of the Liard Watershed”, was recognized for its originality, technical and analytical quality, contribution to water resources knowledge and significance of results.
Supervised by Water Institute member James Craig, Genevieve’s research is related to a hydrologic model of the Liard basin in northern Canada that she has been developing.
Figure 1. Primary regions within the Liard basin with climate stations, hydrometric gauges and snow survey sites
The Liard basin in northern Canada spans portions of the Northwest Territories, Yukon, British Columbia, and Alberta. The Liard River is the largest tributary to the Mackenzie River with a total contributing area of 275,000 km2.
The model will be used operationally for flood forecasting by the government of the Northwest Territories and as a platform to test improvements to hydrologic models within this region of Canada. The calibration procedure was optimized to exploit and represent available data within this relatively data sparse region in Canada and included calibration of the model structure.
For more information on this year’s Canadian Water Resources Association awards visit: https://cwra.org/en/awards/