Living with lakes: Predicting the effects of climate change on the region’s water sources

A PhD candidate at Laurentian University’s Living with Lakes Centre is creating a computer model of northeastern Ontario’s water systems that can be used to predict the impact of climate change.

Arghavan Tafvizi spent her first two years in Sudbury collecting and studying data on 26 catchments in the Sturgeon River, Lake Nipissing, French River (SNF) and Muskoka River watersheds.

Using what she learned from that research, she started developing a hydrologic model of the SNF using a computer program called isoWATFLOOD that can simulate changes in the environment.

Once the model is complete, Tafvizi will be able to input various scenarios into the simulation to predict their impacts on water in the region.

“We are coding all of the important processes that occur in the environment. The model will allow us to input information like changes in temperature or rainfall data, and it can simulate how that will impact things like the level of water in the soil or in rivers,” she said.

“It gives us a perspective of the future and what we could be faced with. When we can predict what could happen, it gives us the opportunity to manage our water resources better and to adopt strategies for reducing the inverse impacts of climate change on people’s lives.”

Tafvizi’s interest in water management and hydrology began while she was working towards her Master of Science degree in water engineering at the University of Tehran, where she studied greywater treatment using constructed wetlands.

“I found that if people want to control the herculean impacts of climate change on the environment, the key strategy is to know our surrounding environment,” she said.

“With this dream in mind, I started to look for a supervisor to continue my studies.”

At the time, she knew that Canada was one of the top countries in the field of water management, and specifically, hydrology.

Hydrology is the branch of science concerned with studying the properties of the Earth’s water and its movement in relation to land.

“I was lucky enough that Dr. April James and Dr. Charles Ramcharan, my supervisors, accepted me as their PhD student. I started my PhD in Boreal Ecology at Laurentian in 2018,” she said.

The scope of Tafvizi’s work is geographically immense.

Lake Nipissing alone is the fourth largest inland lake in Ontario draining into Georgian Bay (the Great Lakes system) via the French River.

The lake drains more than 12,000 kilometres squared and includes inflow from at least 12 major rivers in the region.

In Tafvizi’s words, Northern Ontario’s watersheds are “really large and really mature.”

“In contrast with southern Ontario, we don’t know a large amount of information about the water resources in the north and how they are connected to each other,” she said.

“In our region, I think, this is the first time we have simulated a watershed as big as this one.”

Tafvizi’s research initially focused on classifying the water resources in northeastern Ontario and identifying the landscape and geological characteristics that caused differences in hydrological responses among the watersheds.

One of her supervisors had about five years’ worth of data sets for rivers in the region, and she gathered additional data on rainfall and groundwater levels.

Upon analysis, this information was compiled into the first paper of her PhD research, which is now under review for the Hydrological Processes journal.

“We have thousands of lakes and rivers in Northern Ontario, many of them in our own backyards. Water is important and it impacts people’s lives in different ways,” she said.

“In most parts of Canada and the world, there are different hydrologic models that are used for different purposes, but the scale of the watershed is really important. If you have a good model, it can be used as a tool to make decisions about the future.”

Tafvizi is about halfway through the project right now, and she expects the model will be completed by the summer of 2022.

Once it is complete, she said it can be used by private companies or governmental institutions for a number of applications, including predicting annual flood patterns.

“For example, if they want to construct a road, they can use the model to simulate what could happen to nearby water resources and the level of water and groundwater if they made those changes to the land,” she said.

“Anything that you can imagine that would impact the water in the system can be simulated by this model.”

She also plans to use the results of inputting different climate change scenarios into the model to estimate the changes in chloride concentration due to road salt application in soil water and streamflow.

“As a result of climate change, we expect that there could be more snow on the ground in the coming years or decades. Because of this, the rate that people add salt on the ground will change, too,” said Tafvizi.

“We want to know how these changes will affect the water quality in our systems. We are really focused on climate change because it’s a crisis right now.”

Tafvizi, the youngest child in a family of six, was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. She said that her mother always taught her children “to have big dreams and do our best to reach them.”

“I always wanted to work in a field that directly impacts people’s lives,” she said.

“I am so grateful that I am here. The community in Sudbury and the Living with Lakes Centre have just accepted me as a member of the family. I have never felt that I am a stranger or that I don’t belong here.”

The Local Journalism Initiative is made possible through funding from the federal government.

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Courtesy of Toronto Star