Abstract
Evaporation from a reservoir’s surface is an important component of water balance calculations. Using long-term (1955–2020) climate data from Alberta Climate Information Service, we estimated gross and net lake evaporation from fifteen reservoirs in the South Saskatchewan River Basin of Alberta based on Morton’s complementary relationship-based model. We ranked the reservoirs based on various criteria to identify the reservoirs with significant evaporative losses. The net maximum annual evaporative loss from fifteen reservoirs ranges from 659 cubic decameters (dam3) to 21,251 dam3. Our analysis reveals that there are six reservoirs with significant net evaporative losses (e.g., > 70% of total annual maximum net loss). We also performed additional evaporative loss calculations on these six reservoirs using the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Agency (PFRA)-modified Meyer’s method. We compared the differences between the two evaporation models. Our results show that Morton’s model shows better consistency than PFRA-Meyer’s model considering data availability and the sensitivity of evaporation estimates. We also applied Morton’s shallow lake and deep lake models for those six reservoirs to analyze the seasonal variabilities in evaporative losses. Although on an annual scale, both models provide similar results, we demonstrated that the deep lake model is able to capture monthly variabilities better than the shallow lake model.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Dr. Anthony Liu of Environment and Climate Change Canada, Dr. Hyung Eum of Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, and Mr. Ralph Wright of Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation for providing necessary data and model for this study. Mr. Michael Seneka from Alberta Environment and Protected Areas also provided some initial reviews in this study. We are grateful to the Prairie Province Water Board (PPWB) Secretariat and the PPWB Committee on Hydrology for providing valuable comments and suggestions at the early stages of this study.
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Appendix 1: List of Fifteen Reservoirs Included in the Current Study and in the EPA Naturalized Flow Model
Appendix 1: List of Fifteen Reservoirs Included in the Current Study and in the EPA Naturalized Flow Model
Reservoir name | Location | Starting year | Elevation (m) | Surface area (m2) | Live storage (m3) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Lat | Lon | River Basin | Pre-construction | Post-construction | ||||
Chain | 50.178 | − 114.205 | Willow Creek | 1966 | 1329 | 1,214,000 | 3,120,000 | 14,555,000 |
Pine Coulee | 50.091 | − 113.754 | Willow Creek | 1999 | 1085 | 6,140,000 | 78,523,000 | |
Waterton | 49.305 | − 113.701 | Waterton River | 1965 | 1195 | 11,600,000 | 114,344,000 | |
St. Mary | 49.392 | − 113.164 | St. Mary River | 1951 | 1108 | 37,500,000 | 368,812,000 | |
Twin Valley | 50.266 | − 113.369 | Mosquito Creek | 2003 | 986 | 8,600,000 | 270,841,000 | |
Oldman | 49.654 | − 114.069 | Oldman River | 1991 | 1263 | 24,200,000 | 323,000,000 | |
Spray | 50.964 | − 115.327 | Spray River | 1950 | 1676 | 2,489,000 | 19,900,000 | 259,032,000 |
Minnewanka | 51.227 | − 115.468 | Cascade River | 1917 | 1652 | 13,355,000 | 21,500,000 | 222,027,000 |
U. Kananaskis | 50.616 | − 115.177 | Kananaskis River | 1932 | 1706 | 5,949,000 | 7,800,000 | 102,379,000 |
L. Kananaskis | 50.702 | − 115.178 | Kananaskis River | 1955 | 1706 | 3,076,000 | 5,250,000 | 63,524,000 |
Barrier | 51.052 | − 115.048 | Kananaskis River | 1948 | 1516 | 2,600,000 | 24,670,000 | |
Ghost | 51.227 | − 114.769 | Bow River | 1932 | 1393 | 11,600,000 | 70,925,000 | |
Bearspaw | 51.139 | − 114.211 | Bow River | 1955 | 1175 | 1,950,000 | 13,815,000 | |
Glenmore | 50.964 | − 114.071 | Elbow River | 1933 | 1060 | 3,840,000 | 17,762,000 | |
Gleniffer | 52.013 | − 114.216 | Red Deer River | 1983 | 946 | 17,600,000 | 278,000,000 | |
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Islam, Z., Tanzeeba, S., de la Chevrotière, C., Rokaya, P. (2024). Estimating Lake Evaporation for the South Saskatchewan River Basin of Alberta. In: Gupta, R., et al. Proceedings of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineering Annual Conference 2022. CSCE 2022. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 367. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35471-7_65
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