Grant: Alliance Grants

Canada is blessed with plentiful water resources which have contributed to making it a leader in water-related fields such as hydropower and flood management. Nonetheless, major floods have caused millions of dollars of damages in the recent years and multiple initiatives have been put forth to evaluate methods to better predict their timing and magnitude to help public safety officials plan emergency response interventions. For the last 25 years, the hydrometeorological consulting firm Hydro Météo has helped municipalities, public safety agencies and watershed management organizations to forecast floods, prevent ice jams and instrument rivers across the province of Québec. Their expertise in hydrological forecasting allows them to provide custom analyses for their clients, improving response times and preventing damages to infrastructures and risks to human life as much as possible.Currently, Hydro Météo uses a forecasting system based on a simple, yet skillful, hydrological model running on a daily time step, and they run their model using weather forecasts from different sources to transform precipitation and temperatures into river streamflow. Hydro Météo is currently transitioning to a multi-model approach using an hourly time step to improve forecast resolution and accuracy, especially on smaller (between 20 and 2000 square kilometers) watersheds. However, efficiently implementing a forecasting system using multiple hydrological models and multiple weather forecast products on hourly timescales remains a key issue which and is still debated in the scientific community. This proposed project will evaluate and develop methods to allow sub-daily hydrological forecasting based on model performance in different hydrological regimes. This will make it possible to improve short-term forecasting for flood risk management, but also for more precise estimates of inflows to hydropower reservoirs for hydropower operating utilities.