1.0 Abstract The purpose of this poster is to provide an overview of a GIS data framework and a suite of hydrology tools being developed to support watershed management in Alberta. The poster outlines the rationale and vision for the work, progress to date, and highlights some examples that show data quality and utility. Project milestones include: - progress on a GIS database using an ArcHydro framework; - enhancements on DEMs and live update on time-series data; - development of tools to delineate watersheds and extract key watershed characteristics and data; and - coupling ArcHydro capabilities with hydrology models. 2.0 Background Understanding the Pressures on Alberta’s Natural Environments HYDAT GIS: Visualize, manage, manipulate, analyze, and help to model temporal and spatial processes GIS: Visualize, manage, manipulate, analyze, and help to model temporal and spatial processes WISKI Enterprise Data Warehouse Naturalized Flow Climate Water Quality EMS Water Use Air, Land and Biodiversity AlbertaArcHydroFramework Streams & Monitoring Drainage Areas Hydrogaphy Channels Surface Terrain Rainfall & Snow Ortho- Photography Land Cover/Use Soil Geology Remote Sensing ModellingInterfaces Automated Watershed Delineation & Characterization Water Resources Models Week of year Discharge (m Natural flow Desktop (Hydrological) SSRB IFN (Holistic) Week of year Discharge (m Natural flow Desktop (Hydrological) SSRB IFN (Holistic) IFN recommendation Week of year Discharge (m Natural flow Desktop (Hydrological) SSRB IFN (Holistic) Week of year Discharge (m Natural flow Desktop (Hydrological) SSRB IFN (Holistic) IFN recommendation Geospatial Data Time Series Data ArcHydro Geodatabases ArcHydro Tools ArcHydro Geodatabases ArcHydro Tools Naturalized flow Flood mapping Water quality mapping Water allocation (e.g., AWAIT) SOE reporting Groundwater mapping 3.0 Rationale – Why the need for watershed management tools? 4.0 Vision – ArcHydro as a Foundation for Watershed Management As seven established Watershed Planning and Advisory Councils (WPACs) become mature over time, their planning tools and requirements will become increasingly more complex (e.g. near real-time modelling). Alberta is leading the way to develop, design, and implement integrated resource (air, land, water & biodiversity) management plans to meet the Land Use Framework’s legislated mandate. GIS and ArcHydro provide a strong foundation and start point for progress down this path, and Alberta is also a busy place and is facing significant pressure on its biodiversity, air, land and water resources! Pressures include activities related to hydrocarbon recovery, agriculture, forestry, mining, expanding settlements, water control structures, municipal and industrial discharges, and linear disturbance such as transportation, pipelines and seismic exploration. These pressures pose complex social, economic and environmental challenges. Water for Life: Alberta’s Strategy for Sustainability endorsed a partnership approach to watershed planning and management. Factors Influencing the Variability of Alberta’s Natural Environments The Province of Alberta includes some of the most diverse terrain and waterscapes in North America. Totaling 661,000 km 2, Alberta’s landscapes vary from hot dry badlands, vast unbroken forests, alpine tundra, massive icefields, rich agricultural lands to rolling grasslands. These landscapes are also home to a rich diversity of plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. are well suited to the adaptive management challenges of Alberta. Water Ground Data accessed through GoA Citrix and Canada Internet Map Service Data accessed through GoA Citrix and ministry websites LiDAR

Others Version 2 of AB_ArcHydro was produced using the raster Provincial 100m DEM plus high quality hydrography (stream network) that was burned into the DEM. When a Hydrocorrected 25m DEM became available it was used for Version 4 of ArcHydro. It was presumed that since the DEM had been resampled* with the drainage network taken into account, this would be an improvement over ArcHydro 2. (*the 25m grid size was resampled from the 100m DEM, by interpolation) However, user acceptance testing of ArcHydro 4 data set is ongoing as several issues have been identified with the Hydrocorrected Provincial 25m DEM layer. For the moment, ArcHydro 2 remains the endorsed version for watershed delineation purposes. Raster Data Raw DEM Filled DEM Flow direction Flow accumulation Stream Definition Stream Segmentation Catchment Grid Slope Slope greater than 30% Vector Data Catchment Drainage Line Adjoint Catchment Drainage Point Longest Flow Path For Catchment Longest Flow Path For Adj.Catchment Centroid of Catchment Daily Time Series Data Streamflow data Water level data Precipitation data Snowfall data Rainfall data Temperature data Sunshine data Snow pillow data Wind speed/direction data Network The geometric network The complex edge feature class The hydro junction of the network The relationship of hydro junction and catchment watershed Data Created in AB-ArcHydro 5.0 AB-ArcHydro: Progress to Date SDE geodatabases created for each of the 18 ‘major’ basins in the province (stream definition of 5 km 2 ) AB-ArcHydro is currently accessed two ways: - Stand-alone Desktop ArcGIS - Citrix thin-client AB ArcHydro example for North Saskatchewan River Basin Data organized into 18 major basins 6.0 AB_ArcHydro: Current and Future Applications and Development Reconciling the Provincial DEM Coupling to Hydrologic Models Maidment, D.R Arc Hydro – GIS for Water Resources, ESRI Press The “Alberta Desktop Method” Recommendation for Environmental Flows uses historical natural flows to come up with an instream flow recommendation that is fully protective of the aquatic environment and in the absence of reach specific studies. It is typically applied on a weekly time step, meaning that there are 52 recommendations based on the weekly flow duration curve and computed environmental baseflow for that week. This results in fairly routine but intensive computations, and has been automated within an Application that functions with the AB_ArcHydro data. ArcHydro Geodatabases ArcHydro Tools Water Budget Summary MIKE SHE Integrated Hydrologic Modelling Simulated Hydrograph Watershed/Climatic Characteristics Channel Characteristics DHI ( Evaporation data Humidity data Natural flow data Evapotranspiration data Others A process for reconciling identified variances and known issues arising between different topographic-based datasets needs to be developed. This is a broader initiative than just ArcHydro. It is recognized that no data set is without issues; but migration toward a single, adequately maintained and continually updated topographic data set for routine watershed delineations using common digital methods and tools would be ideal. Example: Drainage areas derived for WSC Sub-regions using pour points and the Alberta 25m Hydrocorrected DEM (colour polygons), as compared with prior drainage boundary delineations (black lines) Areas circled in red indicate places where the hydrocorrected DEM is at significant variance to existing watershed delineations. In both cases this has been tracked to likely DEM errors – canals not being removed from the terrain – resulting in portions of the lower Bow draining south to Oldman (pink) or north to Red Deer (green). Live data links to Department databases Versions 1, 3 and 4 of AB_ArcHydro were each published with a time series (TS) database of hydrologic and climate data. Although comprehensive, the data was static in nature. Copies of time series were used to populate the ArcHydro database, meaning that the update of new information (and subsequent corrections to data) requires continued maintenance. The update process depends on resource needs that are not predictable or assured. Alberta Desktop Method Application: Computations and Report A major goal for establishing a single source of hydrology- related time series and spatial data is to make model development, calibration and operation quicker and easier. Models that can process ArcHydro-compliant databases will be able to seamlessly interface with data sources. It is expected that ArcHydro databases and tools will support models that estimate water budgets, compute natural flows and simulate hydrographs in ungauged basins. Testing of the MIKE SHE model for several pilot projects has been undertaken (MIKE SHE does not yet directly support ArcHydro but was planning to develop that functionality.) Weekly Flow Recommendations Historical Availability Matrix Hydrologic Stats/ Summary Charts Word Document Summary Report TS 1 TS 4 TS 2 TS 3 TS 5 While this is workable, in principle it is preferred to reference a single true source of original data, rather than rely on standalone replications. A better solution would be to develop permanent and open data connections to Department information systems (like the WISKI time series manager, or the Enterprise Data Warehouse/EDW) to ensure the most correct and up-to-date information is always presented by AB_ArcHydro. WISKI TS 1TS 5 TS 4 EDW TS 2 TS 3 AB_ArcHydro Applications AB_ArcHydro Applications