Haoyu Yin, Andrew Wiebe, David Rudolph, Jeffrey McKenzie (2022). The Influence of Weather Seasonality on Well Vulnerability in Cold Regions. Proceedings of the GWF Annual Open Science Meeting, May 16-18, 2022.

The residents of Carmacks, Yukon Territory, rely heavily on groundwater as their water supply, and a municipal pumping well surrounded by an oxbow of the Yukon River supplies most of the demand for the Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation. The high level of dependence on groundwater at Carmacks makes groundwater protection necessary. Human activities, such as land-use practices and waste disposal in landfills may, impact groundwater quality, and remediation will be costly and difficult once the Lots'an and Chu íntthi Aquifers have been contaminated. Further, the increasing flooding risk at Carmacks is another threat to groundwater quality. A well vulnerability assessment is recommended to understand the impacts of anthropogenic activities and flooding, where accurate well capture zone estimation is integral. Methods for calculating well capture zones with analytical solutions are limited to simple cases and steady state assumptions, but numerical methods can incorporate flow boundaries posed by surface water features and produce capture zone simulations that deal with variable hydrological conditions. Therefore, a fully integrated surface water-groundwater numerical model, HydroGeoSphere (HGS), is used to simulate well capture zones under three scenarios which represent different situations. The first scenario focuses on the well capture zone under a steady-state flow field, the second scenario examines the impacts of seasonal weather changes on the well capture zone, and the third scenario analyzes the influence of flooding hazards on the well capture zone. Based on initial results, flooding and changes in seasonal weather likely influence the extent and orientation of the capture zone compared with a steady-state scenario The research outcomes are expected to advance well vulnerability assessment in Carmacks and provide insight for future groundwater studies in cold regions.

AOSM2022 Transformative Science Projects-New Tools for Northern Groundwater Vulnerability Assessment First Author: Haoyu Yin, University of Waterloo Additional Authors: Andrew Wiebe, McGill University; David Rudolph, University of Waterloo; Jeffrey McKenzie, McGill University.