Hydrology

Storm water, drinking water, and water infrastructure issues are among faculty members’ research interests. Researchers model stormwater systems and best management practices (BMPs).

Reducing drinking water consumption and waste within the distribution systems help protect water resources and secure our water supply.

Faculty also conducts research on how climate change impacts existing water management methods and how they can be adapted, as well as on the design and planning of water and sewer pipe replacement projects.

Research in this area includes assessing the potential of wetlands to mitigate flood and low-water events in a context of climate change. Remote sensing is a valuable tool for characterizing riparian strips, estimating river discharge at sites that are not measured, and characterizing signs of water erosion, ground moisture, and nitrogen levels in crops

Faculty interests include aquatic habitat quality, analysis and modelling of variables such as water temperature and river sediment, and the modeling of climate change impacts on the thermal regime of lakes and reservoirs. INRS professors are also hard at work developing remote sensing techniques for monitoring algal blooms in freshwater lakes. Other areas of research include the modeling of complex river ecosystems such as the St. Lawrence using a combination of hydrodynamic and water- and habitat-quality modelling techniques.

In recent years, extreme weather and climate have become an important research priority at INRS. Research teams are developing new approaches to better characterize the spatial and temporal structure of precipitation, assess how climate change impacts the evolution of precipitation, and characterize extreme precipitation in regions for which data is unavailable (e.g., northern Quebec).

Assessing probable maximum rainfall and snowfall based on output from climate models is an important research topic for dam management applications. Temperature is also an important climate variable, and researchers are particularly interested in the effect of events such as heatwaves on human health. As for paleo-hydroclimatology, researchers in this field seek to reconstruct the climate regimes and temperature and precipitation extremes of the past, with a particular emphasis son floods and storms, in order to characterize how climate change affects natural variability in the hydrological cycle.

Cryological monitoring can be divided into subthemes related to snow, ice, and ground temperature. Research teams are modelling how climate change affects ice on lakes and reservoirs, using radar to monitor and automatically map river and coastal ice, and working on the development of an interactive atlas to indicate the probability of ice hazards for marine and coastal infrastructure. Other ongoing work includes the development of remote sensing tools to monitor seasonal freeze-thaw cycles, map snow cover and ground movement due to permafrost melting, and estimate snowmelt volume.

Water-atmosphere-infrastructure interactions in coastal environments are a growing source of concern in light of climate change. INRS research teams are looking at coastal processes such as coastal and hydrodynamic erosion, storms and floods, sediment transport, natural disasters, wave/sediment interaction, currents, saltation, and the behaviour of infrastructure in marine environments. Coastal circulation, mixing processes, frontal zones, and the impact of climate change on these processes and on biological production are other topics of interest at the INRS Eau Terre Environnement Research Centre.