The water cycle is broken. The sustainable development narrative has failed and Water Bankruptcy is on the Horizon but the solutions and expertise needed are here and clear. In this episode of The Gravity Well Podcast with Jenny Yeremiy, co‑hosted by Bob Morrison, I speak with Dr. Tricia Stadnyk—a Canada Research Chair in hydrologic modelling and environmental engineer at the University of Calgary—about water modelling and water security in southern Alberta and beyond. Tricia explains that her work spans global to local scales, using models to understand how climate change affects continental water supply and then zooming down to impacts on communities, ecosystems, farms, Indigenous communities, and urban areas.
Tricia outlines a “modelling chain” of distinct but linked tools: climate models provide temperature and precipitation inputs, which feed land‑surface or hydrology models that estimate bulk water supply from rain and snow before human use. Groundwater and groundwater–surface water interactions are often modelled separately because of their complexity and long timescales, while hydraulic models simulate how water moves through rivers, enabling flood forecasting and floodplain mapping that influence insurance rates. At the end of the chain, water resource management models (“worms”) incorporate human interventions such as licences, irrigation withdrawals, reservoirs, and releases to estimate post‑use water supply. These models are usually run sequentially rather than fully coupled, with each step increasing in resolution to translate global climate signals into local hydrologic and hydraulic predictions.
The discussion then turns to specific processes and uncertainties, including glaciers, groundwater, and land‑use change. Tricia notes that the contribution of glacier melt to systems like the Bow and South Saskatchewan Rivers is complex and only recently being studied in detail, with earlier climate models underestimating glacier loss because they missed feedbacks such as wildfire ash darkening ice and accelerating melt. She explains that glaciers are crucial for headwater supply and that their melt feeds both rivers and groundwater, affecting late‑summer baseflows and water temperature, which are vital for aquatic ecosystems. Land‑use changes such as logging are incorporated by dynamically updating land‑cover data from satellite imagery so hydrology models can adjust runoff responses, while other cumulative effects (like fish health) are handled by separate ecological models that use hydrologic outputs such as flow and temperature. Throughout, Tricia stresses that model choice and complexity must be “fit for purpose,” balancing computational limits and the need for timely decisions, especially for operational tasks like flood forecasting.
A major theme is the shift from traditional “standards‑based” engineering (e.g., designing for a single “1‑in‑100‑year” event) toward adaptive, risk‑based management that embraces uncertainty envelopes and integrates environmental, economic, social, and cultural risk. Tricia argues that decision‑makers must choose where within a range of possible flows to design, based on their tolerance for being wrong and the consequences for communities and infrastructure, and that this inherently political and social process cannot be automated away by AI. She calls for a federal water policy framework that centers water in governance and economic planning, asking what the “resiliency threshold” of Canada’s water supply is rather than aiming merely for “sustainability,” given that basins like the South Saskatchewan are already oversubscribed and in deficit. This includes scrutinizing new industrial developments (from oil and gas to data centres) through a water‑availability lens and recognizing water as the limiting factor in many sectors.
The conversation also highlights serious data and governance gaps. Tricia explains that many social and local water uses are poorly captured: licences are modelled at their full legal volume because actual consumptive use is not monitored, return flows from irrigation are often unmeasured, and tributary and small‑stream uses can be invisible to models.
If your body were as sliced and diced as our water system is—how do you think you would fare?
Now consider, you are ~60% water.
