A practitioner-oriented regional hydrology data product for use in site-specific hydraulic applications

Abstract

Abstract In the 465,000 km2 Canadian Prairies ecozone, robust hydrological input data for hydraulic model applications are uncommon because of the sparse monitoring network and the intermittently connected stream network. New hydrological datasets can offer a valuable advancement for making water management decisions and designing infrastructure in this water stressed region. The Prairie Hydrology Design and Analysis Product (PHyDAP) was created to address existing limitations, and provides a comprehensive regional dataset for use in hydraulic modelling applications. PHyDAP is a collection of outputs from a physically based hydrological modelling framework, run for periods ranging from 38 to 150 years, according to three climate forcing datasets. The dataset includes vertical and lateral fluxes (rainfall, snowmelt, upland runoff, and open water evaporation) and basin streamflow, at hourly or 3-hourly intervals for the >4000 small basins of approximately 100 km2 that span the region. This contribution describes the motivation for this work and methodology used to derive the data product, summarizes the data and its accessibility, and provides an overview of potential use cases.