Water Resources Management

The work on water resource modeling has been focused on two main thrusts:

a. Application of existing water management models (e.g., WEAP); and

b. Integrating water management in land models.

The first thrust has more detailed representation of water management, and the second thrust has more detailed representation of hydrologic processes. Much more work is needed in order to account for the human impacts on the terrestrial water cycle across Canada.

The core modeling work on water resources modeling will be extended to focus on pan-Canadian simulations, to improve the representation of water infrastructure in simulations of the terrestrial water cycle. A key task is to improve the representation of lakes in land models. This includes representation of small lakes (i.e., sub-grid lakes that are not represented as objects on the river network); large lakes (i.e., the lakes that are represented as objects on the river network); and managed lakes (i.e., representation of reservoir management). An important issue is the coupling of the lake water balance and the lake energy balance. A secondary task is to explicitly represent water diversions and irrigation. We will conduct a detailed comparison between land models and water management models to identify key model development needs.