The Water Security Agency (WSA) is responsible for water management in the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada. This includes managing water supply, protecting water quality, ensuring safe drinking water, wastewater treatment, reducing flood and drought damage, protecting aquatic habitat, and managing 72 dams and related supply channels. In response to extreme and widespread flooding that occurred between 2010 and 2014, WSA has been improving tools and models for streamflow forecasting and reservoir operation planning, in collaboration with the national research platform FloodNet and the University of Saskatchewan. The new, physically-based, hydrological models are expected to better handle the challenging prairie and cold region processes than most existing hydrological models. 

To operationalize these new models, WSA has adopted Delft-FEWS as their data and model management platform and decision support system. The system acquires all model forcing data and provides a user interface for forecasters to create model input files, run a series of hydrologic, reservoir simulation, and hydraulic models, and analyze the results for the Upper Souris River, Wood River, Swift Current Creek, Qu’Appele River, and Saskatchewan River watersheds. See image below including 8 reservoirs for which a reservoir simulation model is included.

 

The WSA Delft-FEWS application is used daily by WSA forecasters during the open water season to monitor hydrometeorological conditions, generate flow and water supply forecasts for key watersheds, and make operating decisions for WSA’s major reservoirs and river systems. Their forecasting products include a Conditions at Freeze-up Report, Spring Runoff Outlook, Saskatchewan River Basin 10-day Forecasts, and a monthly Water Supply Outlook. The products are publicly available on their website.

 

WSA financed development of the system and hosts the operational system on-site. The implementation team consisted of prime contractor Deltares USA (quality review) and subcontractors Stichting Deltares (technical lead) and RTI (HEC model and Aquarius integration). Since the project was initiated and delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire design and implementation phase was conducted without a single site visit, relying instead on online communication tools.

    

 

The Delft-FEWS-WSA client-server system integrates the modelling packages Raven, MESH, HEC-ResSim, and HEC-RAS to perform flow forecasting and reservoir management for five watersheds. Near real-time station observations and Numerical Weather Prediction grids from the WSA Aquarius server, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), and NOAA are automatically imported, validated, and processed to force the model chains. The models run in near real-time for three modes: update, short-term (2-10 day) and long-term (90 day) forecasts. WSA forecasters can make manual adjustments using the interactive forecasting functionality within Delft-FEWS.

Long term ensemble simulation hydrograph of one of WSA’s RAVEN models, with basin averaged precipitation (1st subplot), snow/rain distribution (2nd subplot), temperature (3rd subplot) and streamflow results (4th subplot)

 

The Delft-FEWS WSA application is unique for various reasons. It is the first Delft-FEWS application to…

• integrate a gridded, physically-based hydrological MESH model 
• integrate a HEC-ResSim reservoir model on a Windows operating system
• import data from the latest Aquarius web service

Spatial Display in Delft-FEWS WSA showing the gridded streamflow results of one of the MESH models.

 

The WSA system is about to transition into a support and maintenance phase. In parallel, the project team and WSA are discussing ideas for future enhancements, such as model improvements (e.g. recalibrated RAVEN models), the addition of new models (e.g. MESH for Saskatchewan River watershed), data feeds (e.g. gate settings), and configuring additional Delft-FEWS functionality (e.g. archiving, model performance and data-assimilation).