Feb 19 to Mar 12, 2025 (Multiple Dates): Research outcomes from the Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program (FHIMP)
The Canadian Water Resources Association (CWRA) is pleased to announce a webinar series in early 2025 in collaboration with Environment and Climate Change Canada’s National Hydrological Service (NHS). This series will highlight groundbreaking hydrology and hydraulics research conducted as part of the Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program (FHIMP) and showcase the latest advances in flood mapping science across Canada.
The webinars are targeted at flood mapping practitioners, researchers, interested parties, and the general public, offering an opportunity to tune in for presentations from subject matter experts at no cost to the participants. All webinars and accompanying materials will be offered in both official languages. Recordings of the presentations and resources will also be made available online after the sessions.
Register today to attend the individual webinars:
- Jongho Keum (Research Associate, McMaster University), “Hydrologic Modeling in Ontario for Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping”
- Speaker Bio: Dr. Jongho Keum is a Research Associate at McMaster University, holding a PhD in Water Resources Engineering from Utah State University. His research focuses on hydrology, water resource systems and engineering, as well as the development of decision-support tools for water resource and quality management. Dr. Keum has contributed to various projects involving hydrologic modeling, flood forecasting and early warning systems, and the design of hydrometric networks.
- Presentation Description: This study focused on configuring three hydrologic models—MESH, HYPE, and SUMMA—for application in Ontario, enabling the identification of flood hazard regions. Additionally, we tested both model-agnostic and model-specific modules to establish a centralized and consistent model configuration process.
- Cuauhtémoc T. Vidrio Sahagún (Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Calgary), “Modelling water extremes in a changing world through statistical approaches”
- Speaker Bio: Dr. Vidrio-Sahagún earned a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the University of Guadalajara and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Calgary. He is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on extreme hydrologic and climatic events under climate change and other human-induced changes
- Presentation Description: Water extremes, like heavy rainfall and floods, may intensify with climate change, but their nonstationarity is often overlooked. We develop advanced methods for hydrologic frequency analysis and bias correction that improve prediction accuracy and reliability, prevent over- or under-design, and support climate-resilient engineering practices. Our frameworks integrate recent research advancements, account for nonstationarity, and facilitate reproducibility.
- Mélanie Trudel (Professor, Université de Sherbrooke), “Analysis of the Impact of Bathymetric Data on Floodplain Mapping”
- Speaker Bio: Mélanie Trudel is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Building Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke. She is an expert in remote sensing of water resources, as well as in hydraulic and hydrological modeling. Her research focuses primarily on the acquisition and integration of remote sensing data, whether satellite, airborne or drone-based, for monitoring water resources. Her expertise was recognized by the 2024 Radio-Canada Scientist of the Year Award, awarded to four representatives, including Professor Trudel, on behalf of the group of researchers who established the benchmarks that will be used to develop the new generation of flood zone and mobility maps in Quebec.
- Presentation Description: Analysis of the impact of bathymetric data on floodplain mapping
Topo-bathymetric LiDAR (TBL) is an emerging method for characterizing river bathymetry. However, its contribution to hydrodynamic modeling and floodplain mapping needs to be assessed. This presentation summarizes the results of research into the integration of TBL LTB data into the hydrodynamic modeling of two rivers in Quebec.
- Martyn Clark (Professor, University of Calgary), “Improving Canadian land models”
- Speaker Bio: Dr. Clark is a Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary. He is also a Schulich Research Chair in Environmental Prediction and Executive Co-Director of the United Nations University Hub at the University of Calgary. Dr. Clark is elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (in 2016) and is the previous Editor-In-Chief for Water Resources Research (2017-2020). Dr. Clark has dedicated his career to advance the science and practice of environmental prediction. His research group builds large-domain terrestrial systems models that are used for a myriad of applications, including environmental forecasting (e.g., predicting floods and water quality threats), climate impact assessments (e.g., understanding climate vulnerabilities at multiple spatial scales), and Earth System prediction (e.g., improving the land component of Earth System models). Dr. Clark has authored or co-authored over 250 journal articles since receiving his PhD in 1998.
- Presentation Description: This project critically reviewed methods used in Canadian land surface models to simulate water movement . The aim was to improve the representation of runoff components, focusing on both saturated and unsaturated subsurface flows. The research identified limitations in existing methods for simulating water flow dynamics. It proposed enhancements to improve the accuracy of runoff calculations and advance their implementation in the Canadian land surface model (CLASSIC), enabling more reliable assessments of climate change impacts.
- Tadros Ghobrial (Assistant Professor, Université Laval), “Multimethodology approach for predicting ice jam flooding”
- Speaker Bio: Dr. Ghobrial is an assistant professor at Université Laval and is an expert in river ice engineering. His research work focuses on understanding the different river ice processes from early frazil and anchor ice formation, the breakup ice jams and ice jam flooding. Also, Dr. Ghobrial is collaborating with several governmental agencies and researchers to develop mitigation methods and early warning system for ice jam flood. He has co-authored more than 50 publications and in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and supervised over 20 graduate students.
- Presentation Description: The presentation will provide an overview of the research efforts by Université Laval river ice research team on predicting ice jam flooding using three different approaches: 1- physics based approach, 2- empirical approach, and 3- data driven approach.
- Nicolas Gasset (Chercheur scientifique, Environnement et changement climatique Canada), “Canadian Surface Reanalysis (CaSR) Version 3: Method, Characteristics and Results”
- Speaker Bio: Nicolas Gasset, Ph.D., is an expert in meteorology and environmental numerical forecasting. After graduating as a mechanical engineer from INSA in Rouen, France, he earned a master’s degree in environmental studies at the Université de Moncton, where he created the first public wind atlases for New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. His doctoral thesis at the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) was on large-scale simulations applied to the atmospheric boundary layer. During his post-doctoral work at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), he developed the Canadian Surface Reanalysis (CaSR), a surface and precipitation reanalysis system that he continues to perfect. He was also responsible for the Global Deterministic Prediction System (GDPS) and worked towards the replacement of the Regional Deterministic Prediction System (RDPS), two of the Meteorological Service of Canada’s main operational weather forecasting systems. His expertise in numerical modelling, reanalysis and technology transfer, combined with his frequently cited and award-winning contributions, recently enabled Mr. Gasset to become the ECCC research scientist responsible for the Canadian Surface Reanalysis (CaSR).
- Presentation Description: The presentation introduces version 3 of the Canadian Surface Reanalysis (CaSR), which was recently made public. The methodology, characteristics and results of this reanalysis will be presented.
- James Craig (Professor and Canada Research Chair in Hydrologic Modelling and Analysis, University of Waterloo), “The Canadian Lake and River Hydrofabric (CLRH)”
- Speaker Bio: Prof. Craig is a professor of civil & environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo and holds a Canada Research Chair in hydrologic modelling and analysis. He is lead author of the Raven hydrological modelling framework, a software tool used for watershed simulation and operational forecasting across Canada. His research focuses on the development and application of improved modelling algorithms, strategies, methods, and datasets.
- Presentation Description: This work aimed to develop a high-resolution and high-quality national scale hydrofabric: a geospatial dataset which describes the extent and connectivity of subwatersheds of water bodies throughout Canada. The dataset includes parameters of interest to hydrologic modellers, including drainage area geometry ant topology for millions of outlet locations and widely used lake and river characteristics. Lastly, it integrates thousands of points of interest, including provincial and water survey of Canada stream gauge locations.
- Jonathan Jalbert (Professor, Polytechnique Montréal), “Interpolation of Precipitation Extremes in Canada for IDF Curve Construction at Unmonitored Locations”
- Speaker Bio: Dr. Jalbert has been a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal since 2017. Their academic journey began in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics at the same institution, where they developed an interest in environmental issues. After completing a master’s degree in Water Sciences at INRS and a dual Ph.D. in Mathematics (Université Laval) and Earth Sciences (Grenoble INP), they specialized in applied statistics for environmental problems. Following a postdoctoral fellowship in Statistics at McGill, they began their research as a professor, focusing on climate extremes and applied statistics in climate sciences.
- Presentation Description: This project aims to interpolate intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves at ungauged sites across Canada using the RDRS 2.1 reanalysis as a spatial explanatory variable in a hierarchical Bayesian model. Building on previous work by Jalbert et al. (2022, 2023), the approach will expand to regions such as British Columbia and the Canadian Prairies while exploring additional explanatory variables like precipitation quantiles. An exhaustive cross-validation will evaluate the model’s performance, with the goal of enhancing the accuracy and applicability of IDF curve estimation for infrastructure design and water management in unmonitored locations.
- Bryan Tolson (Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Waterloo), “Enhancing LSTM-based Streamflow Prediction with a Spatially Distributed Approach”
- Speaker Bio: Dr. Bryan Tolson is an expert in calibration and optimization of hydrologic and water resources models. He has more than 20 years of experience building and calibrating surface water and water infrastructure models across Canada. Developer of the Dynamically Dimensioned Search optimization algorithm used by ECCC, the US National Weather service, and others to calibrate their hydrologic models. Co-developer of BasinMaker lake and river routing network delineation software – used by his research team to generate large-scale model agnostic lake and river routing products such as the Canadian Lake and River Hydrofabric and the Ontario Lake and River Routing Product. Key collaborator on the Raven Hydrologic Modelling Framework software and CaSPAr archive of ECCC’s numerical weather forecasts. Research expertise and interests in hydrologic machine learning applications as well as hydrological forecasting.
- Presentation Description: In this study, we propose a hybrid approach, namely the Spatially Recursive (SR) model, that integrates a lumped long short-term memory (LSTM) network seamlessly with a physics-based hydrological routing simulation for enhanced streamflow prediction. The lumped LSTM was trained on the basin-averaged meteorological and hydrological variables derived from 141 gauged basins located in the Great Lakes region of North America. The SR model involves applying the trained LSTM at the sub-basin scale for local streamflow predictions which are then translated to the basin outlet by the hydrological routing model.
Don’t Miss Out!
This webinar series offers a unique opportunity to explore critical advances in flood mapping science. We hope you’ll join us in February and March!
A certificate of attendance can be provided upon request. For more information, please contact manager@cwra.org
About the Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program (FHIMP)
The Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program (FHIMP) is a collaborative, Government of Canada initiative led by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), in partnership with Public Safety Canada, and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). The FHIMP is investing in updating Canada’s existing flood mapping capabilities.
In partnership with provincial and territorial governments, the FHIMP aims to complete flood hazard maps of higher-risk areas in Canada and make this flood hazard information accessible. These maps will help emergency planning by guiding the placement of evacuation routes and support land use planning by identifying locations for building critical infrastructure and flood mitigation structures like dikes. Flood maps provide reliable information on flood hazards and support decision-makers and Canadians in their efforts to adapt to a changing climate while protecting properties and lives.
A second component of the FHIMP is the funding of universities and non-profit organizations to develop flood science and integrate the impacts of climate change and uncertainty into flood hazard mapping. From 2021 to 2024, the Government of Canada invested $3M in this aspect of FHIMP and these webinars highlight research supported by this investment.
About CWRA
The Canadian Water Resources Association (CWRA) is a national registered charity comprised of members from the public, private and academic sectors who are committed to promoting responsible, innovative, and effective water resources management.
Créée en 1947 sous le nom de Western Canada Reclamation Association, l'ACRH est la seule organisation nationale qui s'occupe de toutes les questions relatives aux ressources en eau dans toutes les régions du Canada. Nous offrons une gamme de services et de programmes axés sur le développement professionnel, l'apport d'expertise et de conseils, l'éducation et la collaboration.