This GIS dataset depicts an estimate of average annual groundwater recharge in the Edmonton-Calgary corridor based on hydrological water budget analysis using climate and hydrometric data from Environment Canada, the Water Survey of Canada, and Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development.
This average annual groundwater recharge grid was generated to assist in building steady-state numerical groundwater flow models for large regions within the Edmonton-Calgary Corridor.
The grid of annual groundwater recharge in the Edmonton-Calgary Corridor was created by generating gridded data for the water budget variables including annual precipitation, annual actual evapotranspiration and sublimation, and runoff using geostatistical interpolation techniques of hydroclimatic point data available from Environment Canada.
The steady-state water balance method used equates recharge to be precipitation minus actual evapotranspiration and sublimation minus annual runoff volume from a defined drainage basin. Residual mapping in ArcGIS was used to calculate this equation across the study area.