Water is essential to Manitoba, from agriculture to drinking water to hydroelectric generation, but it can also be dangerous; floods and droughts are both threats to our province.
We can reduce the negative impacts from both too much and too little water with good water management and appropriate infrastructure, both of which depend on accurate predictions of future water supply.
With a changing climate, we should no longer assume that our future river flows will continue as they were in the past. Instead, water managers are turning to computer models of watersheds to predict floods and plan for long-term hydroelectric development.
However, modeling rivers accurately is a significant challenge in regions where streamflow and weather observations are sparse, and/or have limited data record lengths.
Continue reading at University of Manitoba.
Image via University of Manitoba.