We have updated the Ontario Lake and River Routing Product to version 2 and this new highest quality dataset can be found here. We recommend users to go to version 2 instead of using the version 1 data on this site.

Summary

This lake-river routing product covers the drainage regions over Ontario. We applied BasinMaker, which is a set of Python-based GIS tools that support vector-based watershed delineation, rediscretization, simplification, and revision for complex watershed-lake-river systems (Han et al,. 2021) to develop the Ontario-scale lake river routing product.  

The routing product includes 9 drainage regions corresponding to the 9 Ontario Integrated Hydrology (OIH) dataset extents and the 36 sub-regions correspond to Secondary Ontario Watershed Boundaries (except for small coastal watersheds where sub-regions are kept within a region in the routing product). All 9 drainage regions are each not a watershed as they are draining to multiple outflow points either along a provincial boundary or along a length of shoreline on a Great Lake or Hudson Bay.

Key characteristics of the routing product

• Subbasins: 198,592 subbasins in total, with an average area 5 km². This is a high resolution routing network. Note that it can be simplified (i.e., decrease the spatial resolution) to a routing network with less subbasins using BasinMaker.
• Lakes: 82001 lakes in total, with areas ranging from 0.1 km² to 4506.0 km² 

Data specifications

The structure of the lake-river routing product, the explanation of the GIS files, and their attribute tables can be found here. The list of included points of interest can be found here.

Main BasinMaker inputs for product development

• DEM and Flow direction: Enforced DEM and flow direction (30 m × 30 m) from the OIH data, formatted in raster.
• Lakes:  Polygon shapefile from the HydroLAKES database.
• Included points of interest: 991 observation gauges from the National Water Data Archive HYDAT database, 437 water quality monitoring gauges from the Provincial Water Quality Monitoring Network, and 1878 subbasin outlets extracted from the Quaternary Ontario Watershed Boundaries.

Authors

The Ontario Lake River Routing Product was developed by Ming Han, Hongren Shen, Bryan A. Tolson, and Robert A. Metcalfe 

Contact

Please contact Ming Han regarding the BasinMaker and the routing products.

Support

Support for the product development was provided by the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry.

To cite the routing product, please use:

·         M. Han., H. Shen, B. A. Tolson, J. R. Craig, J. Mai, S. Lin, N. B. Basu, and F. Awol., BasinMaker 3.0: a GIS toolbox for distributed watershed delineation of complex lake-river routing networks, Submitted to Environmental Modelling and Software, 2022.

·         M. Han, H. Shen, B. A. Tolson, and R. A. Metcalfe. The Ontario Lake and River Routing, Canadian Water Resources Association National Conference, June 5-8, 2022. Canmore, Alberta, Canada. ​
 

License

The Routing Product data are free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU general public license. It contains information licensed under the Open Government License – Ontario.