Past events

September 16, 2021

The annual meeting was an important opportunity to review our progress and to streamline our plans and activates for the upcoming year. We took time to reflect on (a) what we hope to accomplish, (b) what challenges and opportunities we face, and (c) what we could do to improve the cross-theme linkages.

May 17-19, 2021

During the GWF Annual Science Open Meeting, the core modelling and forecasting team organised two sessions:

• Mechanistic Modelling under Future Climate session led  by Prof. Martyn Clark and Dr. Prabin Rokaya
• Improved tools for Prediction of Water Futures session led by Prof. Al Pietroniro and Prof. Philippe Van Cappellen

The core team also hosted a session entitled, 'From Fish Toxicology to Covid Monitoring'.

February 10, 2021 (11am -12 pm Saskatchewan time)

Prof. Martyn Clark from the University of Saskatchewan provided a special webinar on the use of various meteorological data for planning/performing scenario analysis under future climate.

Thursday, December 10, 2020, 11:00-14:00 hrs (EST)

A virtual sharing workshop on Canadian Climate and Land Models was jointly organized by the Core Modelling and Forecasting team of the Global Water Futures (GWF), the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) of the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and the Powell Center for the Great Lakes study on December 10, 2020. Professors John Pomeroy (director of the GWF) and Andrew Gronewold (University of Michigan) provided opening remarks, and Dr. Al Pietroniro (Director of the National Hydrological Services) chaired the workshop. The event was attended by about 60 attendees.

The workshop was divided into three components. The first part of the workshop focused on Precipitation and Global Environmental Multiscale Model (GEM) analyses, which included brief introduction to different hydrometeorological prediction systems at the CMC by Vincent Fortin, which was followed by a presentation on Canadian Precipitation Analyses (RDPA, HRDPA and HREPA) by Dikra Khedhaouiria. Then, Milena Dimitrijevic shared on CaPA and GEM reanalysis. The questions and comments from the attendees were posed and responded through an online chat system.

The second part of the workshop focused on the National Surface and River Prediction System (NSRPS). Camille Garnaud highlighted on Canadian Land Data Assimilation System based on satellite data, the data assimilation component of the NSRPS, with focus on the snow analysis. Vincent Vionnet presented on the NSRPS land-surface prediction systems (HRDLPS/HRELPS), with focus on Soil Vegetation and Snow (SVS) and surface fluxes, whereas Etienne Gaborit focused on river routing with DHPS/EHPS (WATROUTE, DZTR, data assimilation). Similar to the first part of the workshop, the interactive discussion was performed through online chat system.

The third and final part of the workshop was on modelling river and lake systems. Vincent Fortin presented on the CMC’s Water Cycle Prediction System, and Camille Garnaud highlighted the results from the evaluation of the Canadian Small Lake model (CSLM) in the context of the NSRPS. The content of the last two presenters (Pascale Matte and Silvia Innocenti) delved on operational hydrodynamic prediction system. While Pascale presented on hydrodynamic forecasting with SHOP/H2D2, Silvia introduced the ensemble approach. The workshop then concluded with closing remarks from Al Pietroniro.

The main discussions were on the skills of precipitation products, with focus on error characteristics of IMERG in high latitude, issues of spatial discontinuity in different products, and bias correction. Some attendees also highlighted the need to have precipitation data with higher temporal resolution (i.e., hourly) to capture extreme events, track propagation of precipitation events and improve watershed modelling. The discussion around the predictability across time scales and particularly the role on initial conditions was another important point of discussion.