Abstract
Managing water retaining infrastructure is a big challenge when meteorological and hydrological forecasts are lacking or are not used to support operational decisions. This can affect the water stage and water quality in retention ponds and storage basins and lead to unwanted consequences such as uncontrolled spills, dam beaches, inundation or operation shutoffs. Forecasting is a sound approach used by key water authorities to make good decisions at the right time and operate infrastructures safely.
However, water management for most mining sites is performed based only on operator experience, while historical data and hydrometeorological forecast data can be used efficiently. This data could help optimize operating instructions for retention ponds and water treatment units. In this presentation, we discuss technical methods and algorithms that have been developed to create a new tool to solve these challenges. The tool integrates a hydrometeorological database, a hydrologic model and a user-friendly interface to manage data, generate scenarios and report results. It can perform in-built procedures or communicate and extract the required historical or forecasted data from external third-party hydrometeorological databases such as Environment Canada’s Weather Office. The new tool uses observed and forecasted rainfall, snow and temperatures to simulate the inflow discharge at key infrastructures for a given site. The results are evaluated and compared based on several scenarios to determine the most critical one.
We will be presenting a case study for a mine located in northern Québec. The model was developed to allow users to manipulate it without any hydraulic or hydrologic background or meteorological knowledge.