CSHS Webinar: Watershed Management and Modeling from the CWRA National Conference

CSHS Webinar:

Watershed Management and Modeling from the CWRA National Conference

 

Date: September 19, 2023

 

This webinar features the winners of the CSHS Student Paper Awards at the 2023 CWRA National Conference in Halifax.

Paper #1: Developing a Novel Interdisciplinary Water Risk Assessment Framework for Sustainable Water Management in Ontario.

This study developed a novel interdisciplinary water risk assessment framework identifying hotspots for 38 sub-watersheds in Ontario. Using secondary data analysis, we integrated data for water quantity, quality, regulatory trends, user conflicts, sector impacts, and media coverage. We find high and moderate risk potential in at least 50% of the studied areas for all categories, thus empirically challenging the myth of water abundance in the Great Lakes watershed in Ontario.

Paper #2: Why should anyone use a blended hydrologic model?

Hydrologic models have undergone many developments in recent decades, though the selection of preferred model structures remains an arduous task. The recently introduced blended hydrologic model is presented, which addresses the question of model structure by representing multiple weighted process options in a single model simultaneously. The weights for each process option can be adjusted in calibration, allowing for an efficient selection of model structure and a high performance in a range of catchments. In this talk, we present recent studies in which the blended model has been updated and achieved a Kling Gupta score of 0.90 on average in the twelve MOPEX catchments in North America, and discuss how the blended model can be used in practice to achieve high model performance in applied projects.

Presenters are, in order of appearance, Guneet Sandhu, recipient of the Professor Bill Stolte Student Paper Award, and Robert Chlumsky, recipient of the Professor Ric Soulis Student Paper Award.  The webinar includes a Q&A session with each presenter.