Modelling biogeochemical processes in the Beaver watershed for testing the suitability of HYPE water quality model for Canadian Basins

The objectives of this study are testing the HYPE model for biogeochemical modelling in Canadian catchments, and exploring methodologies to improve biogeochemical prediction in view of uncertainty analysis and scenario investigation. Total phosphorus concentration is simulated using two approaches: 1) the sequential calibration approach that calibrates the hydrology first and then uses the best hydrological model to infer the biogeochemical model parameters, and 2) the joint approach that infers the hydrological and biogeochemical parameters simultaneously. The joint approach uses the total phosphorus load and streamflow as optimization variables. The two approaches were compared concerning identifiability of both the hydrological and biogeochemical model parameters, and the predictive power of both the hydrological and biogeochemical models. A daily computational time step was used. Outputs of the model are total phosphorus concentration and streamflow. The input data used to set up the models are provided below. -The meteorological data used to force the model is available from Asong et al (2018), https://doi.org/10.20383/101.0111 Asong, Zilefac Elvis; Wheater, Howard; Pomeroy, John; Pietroniro, Alain; Elshamy, Mohamed, "A Bias-Corrected 3-hourly 0.125 Gridded Meteorological Forcing Data Set (1979 – 2016) for Land Surface Modeling in North America," 2018, https://doi.org/10.20383/101.0111 . -The Digital Elevation model (DEM) used to generate the sub-basins and the stream network was obtained from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Digital Elevation Model 2002 ( https://geohub.lio.gov.on.ca/datasets/mnrf::greater-toronto-area-gta-digital-elevation-model-2002 ). -The land use data was obtained from the Ontario Land Cover Compilation v.2.0 ( https://geohub.lio.gov.on.ca/datasets/7aa998fdf100434da27a41f1c637382c ). -The streamflow data used for calibrating the model was downloaded from the Environment and climate change Canada website using the “Beaverton” station name. The following link can be used to enter the station name and download the data at a daily time step, https://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/search/historical_e.html -The soil data was originally obtained from the Soil Landscapes of Canada Working Group (2010), http://sis.agr.gc.ca/cansis/nsdb/slc/v3.2/index.html Soil Landscapes of Canada Working Group, 2010. Soil Landscapes of Canada version 3.2. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. (digital map and database at 1:1 million scale)

While all the input data are collected from other sources that are indicated in section 2, the total phosphorus load and streamflow produced by our HYPE model is used to test HYPE in the Beaver watershed as part of the broader objective of evaluating the suitability of biogeochemical modelling in Canadian basins and to explore improved calibration strategy of biogeochemical model for uncertainty quantification and management scenarios. This dataset supports the water quality modelling (WQM) theme of the GWF Core Modelling and Forecasting Team.

The Beaver watershed (Lake Simcoe)

Model name: HYPE Model version number: 5.5.1 Model source/webpage: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hype/files/release_hype_5_5_1/ Model output pre-processing script: R script used to run Bayesian inference Model output post-processing script: R script used to run uncertainty analysis and for plotting parameter posterior distributions and uncertainty plots Model setup: Time step: 1 day Initial condition: calibrated Boundary condition: none