The Ontario Lake and River Routing Product Version 2 (OLRRP V2)

The Ontario Lake and River Routing Product (OLRRP) is a high-resolution, vector-based lake-river routing GIS product over the Province of Ontario. The OLRRP supplies network topology and various subbasin, channel, and lake attributes required for hydrological modeling. Version 2 of OLRRP is an enhancement relative to Version 1 (here). 

Key upgrades in OLRRP V2 include using the Provincial Digital Elevation Model to derive elevation related attributes, almost 500 non-HYDAT hydrometric stations and over 200 hydropower generating station locations are now defined as Points of Interest (POI), an improved POI snapping procedure improves the inclusion rate and accuracy of POI on the lake and river networks, and an enhanced suite of cloud-based Python GIS post-processing tools (BasinMaker V3.1) are now available for users to access and customize their case study routing networks. 

The OLRRP V2 connects 245,576 subbasins (average area 4.3 km²) and 82,928 lakes (surface areas ranging from 0.1 km² to 4,506 km²) and assigns 4033 POI to these subbasins and lakes. The agreement between ECCC HYDAT reported drainage areas (998 in total) and the corresponding computed drainage areas is excellent. For 74% of comparisons, drainage areas show less than 2% difference while in only 4% of these comparisons, the absolute drainage area difference exceeds 10%.  The OLRRPv2 provides detailed routing networks for any of the above lakes/subbasins/POIs and thus supports semi-distributed hydrological modeling, vector-based routing only modeling and other water resources analyses requiring the connectivity of lakes and rivers in Ontario.

The OLRRP V2 Homepage for online map viewing and download is here.

The BasinMaker V3.1 Post-Processing Tools available on Google Colab can be found here.

In this repository, three different files are attached:

(1) Nine folders for OLRRP V2 in the nine drainage regions in Ontario (i.e., 'NW', 'FNC1', 'FNC2', 'FNE', 'FNW', 'NC', 'NE', 'SE', and 'SW'). Each folder contains several shapefiles files that are used to define a routing network and the related attributes.

(2) A document of data specifications for GIS shapefiles. Details on different shapefiles in (1) and their attributes are clarified in this document.

(3) The master points of interest (POI) spreadsheet for OLRRP V2 in a Microsoft EXCEL file. This file contains all POI used in OLRRP V2.

Note that these data can also be downloaded from the OLRRP V2 homepage.

Please cite the following data and paper publications if you are using the OLRRP V2

Journal Publication

Ming Han, Hongren Shen, Bryan A. Tolson, James R. Craig, Juliane Mai, Simon GM Lin, Nandita B. Basu, and Frezer S. Awol. "BasinMaker 3.0: A GIS toolbox for distributed watershed delineation of complex lake-river routing networks." Environmental Modelling & Software 164 (2023): 105688. (here)

Data Publication

Shen, H., Han, M., Tolson, B., & Metcalfe, R. A. (2024). The Ontario Lake and River Routing Product Version 2 (OLRRP V2) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10844908

If you have any questions, please contact Hongren Shen ([e-mail]).

Updates on Nov 27 2024

A minor fix for gauge count number was made in the summary table and is now available in OLRRP_v2_POI_info_20241127.xlsx.

Other data can still be refered to the previous version here.