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Student Lands Water Award From Consulting Engineers
Funding will allow engineers to study effects of climate change on Ontario's water resources
BY ANDREW VOWLES
A graduate research project that aims to learn how climate change may affect Ontario's water resources has attracted a $40,000 scholarship from Consulting Engineers of Ontario (CEO).
Qi (Tina) Sha, a master's student in the School of Engineering, received the two-year award under CEO's water-quality research scholarship program late last year. The program is intended to foster research in water quality and to allow Ontario faculty members to attract top graduate students. In 2004, Guelph master's student Sarah Watts received the same award in its inaugural year.
This year's funding will allow Sha and a trio of faculty in the Guelph Watershed Research Group to study the impact of climate change on groundwater and surface water and to make recommendations for municipalities, conservation authorities and engineers to mitigate those effects, says Prof. Bahram Gharabaghi, a water resources engineer in the School of Engineering.
“Environment Canada is saying that climate change is happening,” says Gharabaghi, who is working on this project with faculty colleagues Ramesh Rudra and Ed McBean. “How is that going to affect water availability, quality and quantity?”
Warmer winters will probably result in more rapid runoff of rainwater than gradual snowmelt, which could mean less water available for recharging groundwater resources — a key concern for a city such as Guelph, says Gharabaghi. Warmer summers may cause more water to evaporate and remain in the atmosphere.
Global climate change may also cause more frequent and severe floods and droughts. That could lead to water-quality problems, with contaminants such as manure from farm fields washing directly into streams and lakes. Fluctuating water levels also pose problems for water managers operating reservoirs and dams.
What the U of G team learns may help engineers grappling with designing infrastructure to handle more frequent changes in climate and weather conditions, says CEO president John Gamble. Based in Toronto, his non-profit organization represents more than 250 companies across the province.
“This is something we need to get a handle on so we have long-term and sustainable engineering solutions to infrastructure challenges,” says Gamble. “We'll see a basic rethinking on a lot of the assumptions used for designing drinking-water infrastructure and for managing groundwater and other resources.”
Gharabaghi says the research is also intended to help managers and policy-makers in land-use planning and projecting the effects of municipal growth on infrastructure needs.
Although global warming has been in the headlines for years, he says much of the debate about climate change has involved politicians and climate scientists — until now.
“We engineers tend to look at people's daily lives. The science of global climate has been on a global scale but not in anybody's backyard. Now it's trickling down and coming to municipalities.”
Referring to a storm last summer in Toronto that caused millions of dollars' worth of damage to infrastructure, he says: “When climate change turns into a disaster that happens more frequently than people are used to or can cope with, then it becomes an engineer's problem.”
Sha studied water supply and drainage for her undergraduate degree and has a master's degree in municipal engineering. She will use Environment Canada data tracking rainfall and temperature patterns, as well as information captured by geographic information systems (GIS) and available from libraries and conservation authorities. She'll also use models of water quality and climate change to predict changes in water balance in Ontario watersheds.
Guelph researchers used an earlier $40,000 CEO award to develop a decision-making support system based on GIS for water resources management and planning.
The award program was launched after Queen's Park altered regulatory requirements for municipal water facilities following the Walkerton water tragedy in 2000.