April 9, 2024, 12PM SK Time: SK Branch Webinar Series: Saskatchewan closed-basin lakes flood return period modelling study

Speakers: Dr. Kevin Shook

Saskatchewan uses the 500-year flood return period as the standard for regulating new development in flood plains. Simulating flood elevations for closed or semi-closed basin lakes is complicated by prolonged wet and dry periods and interactions between hydroclimate and prairie topography.

A research project is in progress, co-funded by the Water Security Agency through FHIMP, to improve calculation of the 500-year flood for prairie lakes. A hybrid deterministic-stochastic methodology and tool is being developed as an R package that can be applied to any closed-basin prairie lake basin in Saskatchewan, incorporating both past and future climates, and using historical paleoclimate data from tree-rings to better simulate the hydroclimate variability.

This is the seventh webinar in the 2023-2024 SK Branch Webinar Series. You can register for this event or the full series now. Additional events in this series will be posted shortly.