ACWWA Spotlight: Young Professional – Cole Larson

Abstract: Predicting Drinking Water Advisories in Small Municipalities and First Nations Communities Using Artificial Neural Networks
Day 2: December 9, 2020 at 11:00 AM AT

The aging of Canada’s drinking water infrastructure and the increasing impact of global climate change could lead to a rapid increase in the amount of Drinking Water Advisories (DWA) in small and underfunded drinking water systems. As almost every water system is unique in infrastructure, personnel, and environment; the correlating factors of DWAs could be lost in a sea of data. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) can help two fold in this regard, by identifying trends in the wide variety of factors that impact drinking water systems and creating models that help predict future DWAs. During this research an ANN was created in this regard, and was able to find trends within the drinking waters systems of small municipalities and First Nations communities as well as being able to predict future DWA using the given data.

About Cole Larson:

Cole Larson is research assistant at York University and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering at Dalhousie University. He is studying the trends of boil water advisories in Canada.