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PHyDAP (Prairie HYdrology Design and Analysis Product)
The Prairie HYdrology Design and Analysis Product (PHyDAP) is a data set of hydrological model outputs developed in 2023 by the Prairie Water Project of the Global Water Futures program to support hydraulic modelling within the Prairie Ecozone in Canada. It was compiled for use by hydrological practitioners for calculating return-period flows and flooding at small scales, to meet a need for tools that account for the complexities of prairie hydrology and hydrography in the face of non-stationarity from the effects of climate change and surface drainage. Application of the tool supports infrastructure planning on the Prairies.

Development
PHyDAP is the output of model applications on 4175 Canadian prairie basins. Basin delineations were obtained from the HydroSHEDs product, HydroBASINS, each basin having an area of approximately 100 km². The 4175 basins were classified into seven types based on climate, geological, topographical, and land-cover characteristics.

For each basin class, a Cold Regions Hydrological Modelling (CRHM) platform virtual basin model had been created and parameterized to support investigation of the effects of changes in climate and drainage throughout the region. The CRHM models contain cold regions processes that describe Prairie hydrology such as wind redistribution of snow, energy balance driven snowmelt, infiltration into frozen soils, evapotranspiration, depressional storage, and variable rooting depths for crops and grasses. Networks of depressions are connected and disconnected depending on storage state, which also impacts the contributing area for runoff to reach the basin outlet.

For PHyDAP, each basin’s model was forced with local gridded meteorological data derived from either a) historical values b) reanalysis data or c) downscaled and bias-corrected simulations of future climates. PHyDAP datasets are hourly or three-hourly depending on the meteorological forcing data. Each data set comprises values of rainfall, snowmelt, evaporation from ponded water, runoff from uplands, and basin discharges (as depths). The intent is that the PHyDAP outputs can be used to force small-scale hydraulic models, such as SWMM.

Components
The PHyDAP values are computed using several forcing data sets including:1) hourly historical meteorological forcings (1980-–2018; Regional Deterministic Reforecast System), 2) fifteen realizations of 3-hourly combined historical and downscaled future climate forcings (1951–2100; CanRCM4-WFDEI- GEM-CaPA), and 3) hourly reanalysis values (1950–2020; ERA5).

Purpose
The purpose of the Prairie Hydrology Design and Analysis Product (PHyDAP) is to reduce uncertainties in hydraulic design by providing reliable data with which to design and analyze water engineering infrastructure within the Canadian Prairies. The long-time series of the product allows for the estimation of return-period flows and flooded areas.

The product is provided as NetCDF files which can be used by many other programs. Used in conjunction with a suitable hydraulic model, this can support estimation of changes in flows and flooding at specific locations.

Use
The intended users of PHyDAP are hydrological practitioners or watershed managers. Testing of PHyDAP by partners of the Prairie Water project is ongoing, including by the IISD, Saskatchewan Ministry of Highways, and local watershed managers. Training workshops are being held in 2024.

Availability
PHyDAP data sets are available open-access online at the Canadian Federated Research Data Repository.

Cold Regions Hydrological Modelling (CRHM) Platform
The Cold Regions Hydrological Modelling (CRHM) Platform is a hydrological modelling program incorporating the seminal works of Don Gray, Raoul Granger, Pat Landine and John Pomeroy, among others, in representing hydrological processes for small to mid-sized catchments in cold regions of the earth. Code and software development was carried out by University of Saskatchewan engineer, Tom Brown. Used extensively and supported by the University of Saskatchewan's Centre for Hydrology, CRHM has also been used in 57 Canadian and 31 organizations worldwide to build basin hydrology models. In Canada, the platform has been used to support hydrological predictions related to glacier and snow melt in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and western provinces. CRHM includes following components: Basin, Observation, Snow Transport, Interception, Radiation, Evaporation, Snowmelt, Infiltration, Soil Moisture Balance, Wetlands, Flow, Gravitational Snow Transport, Glacier Melt, and Freezing and Thawing Fronts Dynamics.

Operation
CRHM requires files (extension .obs) of high-frequency (preferably hourly) continuous time series of observed air temperature, wind speed, humidity, and precipitation. The R package CRHMr can be used to prepare these time series, including infilling missing values. CRHMr can also be used to post-process and plot CRHM outputs.

Other packages that can be used to acquire data for use by CRHM include MSCr which uses data from Meteorological Service of Canada files, Reanalysis, which creates .obs files from several types of reanalysis files, including ERA, WATCH and NARR , and WISKIr, which uses data from a Wiski web server.

Research supported by CRHM
CRHM has been used extensively in snow modelling  and studies of the effects of climate change on cold regions headwater basins

Canada Water Agency
The Canada Water Agency is a planned organization of the Canadian federal government that is intended to address fragmentation of water resources management, and to protect and promote water quality in Canada in the face of increasing threats such as climate change, pollution, overuse, and loss of habitat. The Agency is expected to coordinate and integrate water-related programmes within the federal government and to form partnerships with other levels of government and Canadian organizations that are focused on water.

In March 2023, the federal government budget announced that the Canada Water Agency would be headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and allocated 85.1 million over five years, starting in 2023-24 to set up the agency.

Global Water Futures
Global Water Futures is a networked Canadian scientific research program, supported in large part by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. The program’s design and foundational data management were informed by several predecessor Canadian research programs including the Mackenzie GEWEX study (MAGS) and the Changing Cold Regions Network, and were influenced by increasing awareness of climate change and development threats to Canadian water supplies and quality. The program, designed to improve disaster warning, to predict water quantity and quality, and to develop risk management tools for water planners and managers, was set up in 2016 at the University of Saskatchewan Global Institute for Water Security with three main university partners: the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University, and McMaster University. Program activities were clustered under the following three categories: identifying and predicting change in cold regions, developing big data and decision support systems, and designing user solutions. The program’s geographic coverage includes important river basins and ecological, climatological, and physiographic regions. Under the Global Institute for Water Security, Global Water Futures committed to supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The program was intended to run for seven years: interruptions caused by the Covid 19 pandemic allowed for some extensions until 2024.

Budget
The budget of CAD 77.84 million from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, was supplemented by CAD 223.15 million in cash and in-kind contributions, including historical data sets, from collaborating research institutions, and other federal government funding. Approximate budget allocations for each of the program categories were:


 * identifying and predicting change in cold regions: 40%
 * developing big data and decision support systems: 45%
 * designing user solutions: 15%.

The program set out to facilitate co-production of knowledge with practitioners and other knowledge users, and to apply transdisciplinary approaches. In January 2019, recognizing the significant role that water plays in Canadian Indigenous culture and communities, the program announced funding for six Indigenous co-led projects to focus on water-related issues

Outcomes
The program has developed 64 projects and core teams, supported operation of 76 scientific observatories and research stations, and has trained 552 student researchers. These have involved collaboration with international partners, especially in the area of mountain hydrology. The program’s work in computational hydrology is especially recognized for its work on models that are applicable internationally. Standards for data management and a common catalogue were developed to preserve access to data sets produced by individual projects.

Global Water Futures has also helped to inform development of the Canada Water Agency, a new federal institution intended to address fragmentation of water management in Canada.

Outputs from Global Water Futures include peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, data sets, and predictive models and tools related to climate that are being applied both within and outside of Canada. Six annual open science meetings have allowed dissemination and discussion of the program work with academic researchers and practitioners. A special project partnered scientists with artists to create paintings and other art that reflected the themes of the Global Water Futures program.

Also of note was adaptation in 2020 of the project, Next generation solutions to ensure healthy water resources for future generations, to provide Covid-19 wastewater surveillance results to major Saskatchewan urban centres, work that has continued into 2023.

In 2023, through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Major Science Initiatives (MSI) program, the Government of Canada approved partial funding support for Global Water Futures Observatories to maintain until 2029 the observatories, research facilities, and data management systems developed and supported by the program.