Modelling the Entire Great Lakes and the Ottawa River Watershed

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Modelling the Entire Great Lakes and the Ottawa
River Watershed
Nick Kouwen Department of Civil
Engineering University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON
,Canada
http//www.watflood.ca
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With a large amount of help from Environment
Canada Alain Pietroniro (Watershed setup) Pierre
Pellerin (Synoptic NWM data) Champa Neal (Flow
data)
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Geography Lesson
Superior
St. Marys R.
Ottawa R.
GB
Michigan
Huron
St. Lawrence R.
Ontario
St. Clair R.
Niagara R.
Detroit R.
Erie
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WATFLOOD Features

• Primary application is flood forecasting and
  flood studies
• Long time series for climate studies and
  frequency analysis
• Ability to model regions from a few km2 to
  Millions of km2
• Automated watershed setup (ENSIM, MAPMAKER,
  TOPAZ)
• Optimal use of gridded data
• eg. Land cover, DEMs, NWP model output, Radar
  data
• Universally applicable parameter set
• Fast
• Very easy to use interface for routine work
• Pick-up truck version

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Highlights

• ENSIM pre and post processor
• Grouped Response Units GRUs
• Wetland model coupled river-wetland hydraulics
  (also bank storage)
• Tracer model flow sourcing (glaciers,
  groundwater, wetlands, etc.)
• There are many other useful features

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EnsimHydrologic

• Developed by the Canadian Hydraulics Centre CHC
• Funded by Environment Canada

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Start with a DEM S. Ontario in this case
L. Huron
Waterloo
Toronto
EnsimHydrologic work space
L. Ontario
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Delineate drainage Watersheds automatically
Specify WATFLOOD grid.
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Zoom edit data
Extract WATFLOOD data
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Watflood Theory GRUs Grouped Response Units
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Elmira LANDSAT

• 10 km grid (or whatever)
• 100 km2 area receives equal meteorological
  input
• group all areas with similar hydrological
  characteristics within a grid for 6 hydrological
  computations/grid
• some people model each pixel or each field
  separately - ok for science, not operations (104
  computations/grid)

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Percent Coniferous Forest Source USGS GLOBAL
LAND COVER CHARACTERISTICS DATA BASE
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Percent Crops Source USGS GLOBAL LAND COVER
CHARACTERISTICS DATA BASE
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Hydrological Modelling
Model executed for each land cover GRU on each
Grid each Hour
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Previous experience

• Original model setup calibration for the Grand
  River watershed in S. Ontario
• Applications include
• Columbia River N. of US Border 50,000 km2
• Mackenzie River 1,7000,000 km2
• Rhone, Rhine, Po and Danube rivers as part of MAP
  (Mesoscale Alpine Project)

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MAP (Fall 1999) Computed flows compared to
observed flows for the Danube River in Germany
Austria Met data from the high resolution MC2
Numerical Weather Model MC2 WATFLOOD
3 km grid
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Tracer Module Components
Tracer 0 Baseflow separation
Tracer 1 Sub-basin separation
Tracer 2 Land-cover separation
Tracer 3 Rain-on-stream tracer
Tracer 4 Flow-type separation - surface -
interflow - baseflow
Tracer 5 Snow-melt as a fn(flow-type) - surface
surface melt - interflow melt drainage -
baseflow interflow melt drainage
Tracer 6 Glacial Melt - surface - interflow -
baseflow
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Model verification

• E.G. Baseflow has been compared to isotope
  analysis of streamflow sources
• All other model components have been similarly
  verified

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Great Lakes Ottawa River Model

• Meteorological Data
• 6 hour Synoptic data for initial setup for
  October 2000 August 2003
• 3 hour GEM (Global Environmental Model) data for
  July August 2003

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• Movie clip is an example of distributed Synoptic
  Data
• (Note the moving Bulls eyes)

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Synoptic data
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• Next movie clip is for July 2003 using GEM data
• (GEM is Canadas operational weather forcasting
  model)

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Animation of Snow Cover (SWE in mm)
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Animation of Grid Outflow
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Flow stations Canada only (to date)
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Computed hydrographs for 50 Sub-Watersheds
400-13500 km2
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Lake Routing
Superior
St. Marys R.
Ottawa R.
GB
Michigan
Huron
St. Lawrence R.
Ontario
St. Clair R.
Niagara R.
Detroit R.
Erie
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Lake Routing Rules (natural state) St. Marys
River Q 824.7(SUP-181.43)1.5 St. Clair
River Q 82.2((MHUSTC)/2-166.98)1.87(MHU-ST
C)0.36 Detroit River Q 28.8(STC-164.91)2.2
8(STC-ERI)0.305 Niagara River Q
558.3(ERI-169.86)1.60 St. Lawrence River Q
555.823(Oswego-0.0014(Year-1985)-69.474)1.5
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Needs work. Ave. lake levels are ok. Variation is
inadequate. Effect of weeds, ice operations not
yet incorporated.
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Summary

• Great tools are required to model large areas
  such as the Great Lakes Ottawa River basin.
• Pre-processor set up watershed files
• Post-processor debugging visualization
• GRUs ensure vastly different hydrological units
  are represented appropriately at the large scale
• Gridded model
• Efficient ingestion of gridded data DEM, Land
  cover, meteorological data (radar, numerical
  weather models)
• Much tweaking to be done!