Meteorological and Hydrological Data from the Alder Creek Watershed, Grand River Basin, Ontario

The main objective of this project was to instrument the Alder Creek watershed with sensors and telemetry in order to collect near real-time hydrological data for monitoring the impacts of urbanization and land use change within a critical area for municipal water supply. The goal of the Southern Ontario Water Consortium (SOWC) was to set up a platform for research, development, testing, and demonstration of new sensors, data processing technology, and services. Alder Creek was instrumented as one of several field observatories, and it represented the middle member of three subwatersheds along a continuum from rural/agricultural (Hopewell Creek) to fully urbanized (Mimico Creek, Toronto). Foci within the project included hydrological data collection and data management. Field data such as meteorological, stream, and groundwater observations were recorded. Near real-time transmission of these data, via cellular network telemetry to an Online data platform (IBM's Intelligent Operations for Water), for display and data analytics, was a complementary aim. Concerns regarding the vulnerability of municipal supply wells to microbial and non-point source contamination, especially under the conditions of extreme hydrological events, were drivers of this work. Note that this project was started within the Watershed Node of the Southern Ontario Water Consortium (SOWC; www.sowc.ca) and funded by the Federal Economic Development Agency of Canada (FedDev) and the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation (MEDI). This data set will also support the project titled 'Transformative sensor Technologies and Smart Watersheds (TTWS): Work Package 1'. TTWS is a Pillar 3 project under the Global Water Futures Program funded by Canada First Research Excellence Fund.