Canada’s hydrometric network

 

Hydrometric stations are located on lakes, rivers, and streams of many sizes, ranging from drainage basins as small as a few hectares to large watersheds such as the Mackenzie Basin (1,680,000 km2). Over 2600 active water-level and streamflow stations are currently operated under federal-provincial and federal-territorial cost-sharing agreements. Streamflow is the volume of water flowing past a point on a river in a unit of time (e.g., cubic metres per second). Most stations are located in the southern part of the country; as a result, the network is often inadequate to describe water characteristics and trends in northern Canada. The Reference Hydrometric Basin Network (RHBN) is a subset of stations from the national network that are used primarily for the detection, monitoring, and assessment of climate change (ECCC, 2017). These stations are characterized by near-pristine or stable hydrological conditions and have been active for at least 20 years (Harvey et al., 1999) (see Figure 6.2). However, the RHBN is also unevenly distributed across Canada (with almost no representation of the high Arctic Islands), and the length of data records varies (Whitfield et al., 2012).