Manitoba Co-operator - Hydrology forecasting tool drills down to field level
Farmers in the Assiniboine River basin will soon have access to a new tool designed to help them make predictions about water flow at the field level. The tool was developed by the hydrologic modelling firm Aquanty, in cooperation with the Manitoba Forage and Grasslands Association. They are able to combine their model with remote sensing data on things like soil moisture levels and real time groundwater monitoring sensors to set the initial conditions before launching a hydrologic forecast. “Combining that with insights on how water management infrastructure is maintained during floods and droughts and using cloud computing infrastructure, we can readily construct these models and deliver them via an app to your fingertips,”
HGS RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT – Coastal Topography and Hydrogeology Control Critical Groundwater Gradients and Potential Beach Surface Instability During Storm Surges
This work harnessed HydroGeoSphere to simulate storm surges and their geotechnical impact on coastal environments. The explicit coupling between the surface and subsurface domain revealed a non-trivial correlation between alongshore topography and the distribution of surge-induced critical gradients. It was found that, in contrast with traditional approaches, the lowest areas along a coastline are not necessarily the ones that are most vulnerable.
HGS RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT – Geothermal Energy Potential of Active Northern Underground Mines: Designing a System Relying on Mine Water
HydroGeoSphere is a powerful tool for evaluating the potential of geothermal heat pump systems. HGS implicitly simulates thermal energy throughout hydrologic systems (including density driven transport effects), and can model extremely complex geological systems with spatially and temporally varying material properties, with or without the presence of discrete fractures, and with the ability to represent mine infrastructure as discrete features within the model.
HGS RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT – Mine rock stockpile reclamation trial, Detour Lake Mine
HydroGeoSphere is a powerful tool for evaluating the hydrology of open pit mining operations. HGS modelling at mine sites is typically at the site scale, and presents a perfect use case for short-term real-time hydrologic forecasting. But HGS can also be a great tool at smaller scales. In this study the authors use 1D column HGS models to evaluate the hydrology of a simple unengineered reclamation cover overlying mine waste rock from the Detour Lake Mine in Northern Ontario. 2D cross sectional HGS models were also constructed to ensure the 1D column models were producing accurate results.
HGS RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT – Evaluation of baseflow separation methods with real and synthetic streamflow data from a watershed
Stream baseflow is inherently difficult to accurately estimate given the varied sources contributing to baseflow, it’s spatial variability, and the logistical difficulties in making physical baseflow measurements. Thanks to the fully integrated nature of HydroGeoSphere, and the fact that HGS was created with a strong emphasis on physics, HydroGeoSphere represents a very powerful tool for baseflow estimation, especially in lightly studies watersheds!