Flexible Subwatershed-based Lake and River Routing Products Available for Hydrologic and Land Surface Models for Canada

The proposed lake-river routing structure can be used as input for hydrology related. It combines catchment polygons from the HydroSHEDS product and lakes from the HydroLAKES product: 1) includes all lakes connected by the river network, 2) describes lake-river routing structures hydrologically correct, and 3) includes all derived routing parameters required to run a hydrologic model, 4) ingest all the Water Survey Canada gauges data in the lake-river routing network. In total, ten routing products are developed within this work, using five watershed delineations (HydroSHEDS product from Level 8 to level 12) and two lake-selection strategies (all lakes and only lakes with an area larger than 1 km2). The developed lake-river routing product will be coupled with the routing simulation model Raven. Raven, in general, is a robust and flexible hydrological modeling framework, but can be setup such that it serves as a routing model only.

Lakes and reservoirs are an important component in hydrological modeling across Canada. In routing processes, for example, lakes and reservoirs can retain parts of snow melt and precipitation in spring and summer, and supply water to rivers in winter and autumn. Moreover, lakes and reservoirs significantly impact simulated flow duration curves. Accounting for them explicitly in hydrologic models can improve peak flow simulations. The lake-river routing structure is a fundamental requirement to include lakes in a hydrologic model. The inclusion of lakes in the routing structure is usually a manual process. For regional or global studies, however, only large lakes are usually added into the lake-river routing structure. This is due to the large number of smaller lakes and the significant processing time required to (manually) include all lakes in the lake-river routing structure. Thus, a geospatial product that explicitly and automatically represents lake-river routing structures is required to enhance the quality of regional and global hydrologic studies. In research, we will develop a pan-Canadian lake-river routing product that 1) includes all lakes connected by the river network, 2) describes lake-river routing structures hydrologically correct, and 3) includes all derived routing parameters required to run a hydrologic model. This research is part of "Lake Futures: Enhancing Adaptive Capacity and Resilience of Lakes and Their Watersheds: Work Package 1". Lake Futures is a Pillar 3 project under the Global Water Futures Program funded by Canada First Research Excellence Fund.

Tolson, B., Han, M, Basu, N., Craig, J., & Mai, J. (2019). Flexible Subwatershed-based Lake and River Routing Products Available for Hydrologic and Land Surface Models for Canada. Waterloo, Canada: Canadian Cryospheric Information Network (CCIN). (Unpublished Data).

Unpublished data