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Flood Frequency Analysis

Through the Institute for Watershed Science at Trent University, Environment Canada long ago supported the development and distribution of an MS-DOS flood frequency analysis (FFA) program (CFA). Use of this software has become standard in the water resources industry, and as systems modernize, the workarounds (DOS emulation) become more complex and leave more people out. Open source options for hydrological analysis in R do exist (such as tidyhydat, but not as much for the powerful Python programming language. The dearth of accessibility results in the proliferation of uncontrolled excel-based tools offered to practitioners through participation in paid workshops. Excel is not open or transparent, and analytical tools developed and disseminated in Excel are not easily peer-reviewed, and are nearly impossible to control.

PyCFA (a name I'll hopefully be able to use) is a basic analytical tool for FFA aimed at the exploration and communication of uncertainty in flood estimation.

Instructional Tools

In my teaching experience at the technical college level, the most common complaint from students is that instructional tools don't reflect professional practice. While there is an argument to the use of simplified procedures to introduce complex concepts, much of the limitations in didactic tools lie in the lack of access to costly proprietary software (ArcGIS, Matlab, etc.), and the time constraints to overcome the steep initial learning curves of some technology that aren't related to the specific topic.

There is immense potential for designing interactive, code-based tutorials that accomplish the same sophistication of analysis as is done in professional practice. Currently, I have developed two such interactive applications for demonstrating principles of hydrology in a classroom setting, involving catchment delineation, flow accumulation mapping, etc., and rainfall-runoff modelling.