Knowledge of the location of Earth’s surface water in time and space is critical to inform policy decisions on environment, wildlife, and human security. Dynamic surface water maps generally represent water occurrence, also referred to as inundation frequency, depicting the percentage of valid observations when water is detected at the surface. The location and duration of surface water varies from areas of permanent water with 100% inundation frequency where water is always observed, to areas of permanent land with 0% inundation where water never occurs. Between these two extremes are areas of ephemeral water that experience periodic flooding with inundation frequencies between 0-100%. National-scale dynamic surface water information was generated for years 1984-2023 at 30m spatial resolution from the historical Landsat archive over Canada. The complete dataset consists of annual water maps and derived products including inundation frequency and inter-annual wetting and drying trends calculated using per-pixel logistic regression. The complete dataset enables an assessment of the timing, duration, and trends towards wetting or drying at regional to national scales.Associated publication:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425722002358

This product provides the median of monthly maximum turbidity values (in nephelometric turbidity units) for drinking water facilities by drainage region. Turbidity refers to the relative cloudiness of water, caused by suspended particles in water. The Survey of Drinking Water Plants collected this monthly maximum turbidity data for surface water sources from facilities reporting turbidity data for at least 10 months in 2013. These facilities served 24 million people and produced 4,091 million cubic metres of potable water from surface water sources in 2013. Source water turbidity was monitored continuously at 42% of these drinking water plants in 2013, daily at 34% of plants and less frequently at the remaining plants.

This product provides the ratio of surface freshwater intake to water yield for August 2013, with the exception of drainage regions 7, 8, 16, 17 and 18, which use the ratio of August intake to the long-term minimum monthly water yield. Surface freshwater intake aggregates data from the Survey of Drinking Water Plants, 2013 and the Industrial Water Use Survey, 2013 with estimates of agricultural water use for 2013 based on the Agricultural Water Use Survey and the Alberta Irrigation Information report. Data for water use by the oil and gas industry and households not supplied by a public water provider are also excluded.

Watercourses are line features - natural or manmade - that represent the location of flowing surface water. This product requires the use of GIS software. *[GIS]: geographic information system

Delimitation of surface drinking water withdrawal protection areas for the territory of the City of Rouyn-Noranda**This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).**

The North America Surface Water Values point dataset contains the current water level and stream flow values as recorded by Canadian and USA hydrometric gauging station locations. Daily values are recorded as well as comparisons with historical measurements, including difference in values from the previous day, the mean level for that calendar date, the annual mean water level, and maximum and minumum recorded levels. Percentile values based on historical average for both water level and stream flow are also included.Real-time gauging station data for Canada is available here: https://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/search/statistics_e.htmlReal-time gauging station data for the United States is available here: https://waterservices.usgs.gov/rest/Statistics-Service.html

Data represents surface water occurrence frequency (percentage), which describes the frequency for each grid appeared as water in the 30 years time period of 1991 to 2020. The data covers Canada’s entire landmass including all transboundary watersheds, and is at 30-meter spatial resolution. The surface water occurrence frequency is derived using the surface water model of Wang et al. (2023) from all-available monthly water data observed by the Landsat satellites (Pekel et al., 2016). Here, permanent waters are represented by 100%, and permanent land surfaces by 0%, of water occurrence for a 30-meter by 30-meter grid.References:Pekel, J.-F., A. Cottam, N. Gorelick, A.S. Belward, 2016, High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes. Nature, 540, 418-422.Wang, S., J. Li, and H. A. J. Russell, 2023, Methods for Estimating Surface Water Storage Changes and Their Evaluations. Journal of Hydrometeorology, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-22-0098.1.

This theme represents an indicator of the availability of summer and winter surface water. It combines a sub-indicator of the pressure of water samples from surface water, and a sub-indicator of the severity of low water levels. The indicator is calculated based on the current and future climate.**This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).**

Existing flood protection works (dikes and bank protection) crest alignment in British Columbia. Updated from available Provincial dike crest survey project data from 2019/2020. If 2019/2020 dike survey project data is unavailable, linework based on previous data from 2004 and prior. May include periodic updates depending on data provided by Diking Authorities and other sources. See Data Source under selected linework for details. For more information on dike management and safety, please see: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-water/water/drought-flooding-dikes-dams/integrated-flood-hazard-management/dike-management For contact names regarding regional diking issues, please see: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/air-land-water/water/integrated-flood-hazard-mgmt/dike_safety_program_contact_list.pdf

This thematic layer represents the characterization of the hardness of surface water in Quebec. The hardness is presented according to the medians calculated from the concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions in seven classes. Water hardness influences the toxicity of certain metals, including barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, manganese, nickel, nickel, lead, and zinc. Surface water quality criteria are determined according to the hardness of the receiving watercourse. These criteria are used to make judgments about surface water quality and are the basis for groundwater criteria used to assess the quality of groundwater that recurs as surface water. Finally, they are the key element in calculating environmental discharge objectives (EORs) used to assess the quality of wastewater discharges to the aquatic environment. For a discharge that occurs on an annual basis, the median hardness of the receiving water body is generally used to calculate water quality criteria for aquatic life.**This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).**