• Research areas
• Research impact
• Research outcomes
• Key staff
• Selected recent publications

Water security is a major global issue with many parts of the world facing serious challenges in ensuring sustainable water supply and use in the face of rising demand for water.

Australia has the added challenge of being the driest inhabited continent (only 10 per cent of rainfall runs off to flow in rivers) with a highly variable surface water resource, both spatially and temporally.

The development of large-scale water infrastructure and the current prolonged drought have put immense pressure on water resources in important regions in south-east and south-west Australia.

We carry out research to develop integrated models to improve the quantification of water fluxes and the impact of climate, land use and development on water. This is achieved through analysis and interpretation of climate, streamflow, land use, remotely-sensed and other data.

Hydrological processes are characterised over a range of temporal and spatial scales, and this is used to build predictive hydrological models. Outcomes from our science are used by governments and industry to guide water resource planning, investment and management.

Research areas

The research areas involved are:

• large scale (top-down) energy and water balance
• hydrological modelling (conceptual rainfall-runoff models, semi-distributed models, land surface models).
• multi-criteria model optimisation in regulated river systems
• model parameterisation with multiple data sources
• predicting streamflow in gauged and ungauged catchments over large regions
• climate and land use impacts on water.

Research impact

Our research is delivered mainly through CSIRO's Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship.

We develop national partnerships where the research outcomes and modelling tools have a clear need, and governments and industry use them to guide water resource planning and management. Some examples of national research initiatives where we play a key role are listed below.

• estimation of daily runoff across Australia for CSIRO Sustainable Yields projects and Bureau of Meteorology water information
• development of the Catchment Water Yield Estimation Tool (CWYET) to provide a common modelling framework for estimating catchment water yield and daily runoff characteristics across Australia (funded by the National Water Commission)
• Development of modelling tools for the water industry - rainfall-runoff library RRL and forest cover flow change FCFC, and eWater CRC Source product for modelling the amounts of water and contaminants flowing through unregulated catchments.

Research outcomes

These are some examples of our research impact:

• estimation of daily runoff across Australia for CSIRO Sustainable Yields projects and Bureau of Meteorology water information
• development of the Catchment Water Yield Estimation Tool (CWYET) to provide a common modelling framework for estimating catchment water yield and daily runoff characteristics across Australia (funded by the National Water Commission)
• development of national framework for estimating plantations impact on water (for the National Water Commission)
• development of modelling tools for the water industry – RRL (rainfall-runoff library) and FCFC (forest cover flow change), and eWater CRC WaterCAST product for modelling the amounts of water and contaminants flowing through unregulated catchments.

Key staff

The key staff involved in catchment hydrology are:

• Santosh Aryal
• Francis Chiew
• Julien Lerat
• Cuan Petheram
• David Post
• Jin Teng
• Jai Vaze
• Neil Viney
• QJ Wang
• Lu Zhang
• Yongqiang Zhang
• Fangfang Zhao.

Selected recent publications

Aryal, SK and Bates BC. 2008. Effects of catchment discretisation on topographic index distributions. Journal of Hydrology. 359: 150–163.

Aryal SK, Bates BC, Campbell EP, Li Y, Palmer MJ and Viney NR. 2009. Characterising and modelling temporal and spatial trends in rainfall extremes. Journal of Hydrometeorology. 241–253. doi:10.1175/2008JHM1007.1.

Brown AE, Podger GM. Davidson AJ, Dowling TI and Zhang L (2007)  Predicting the impact of plantation forestry on water users at local and regional scales: an example of the Murrumbidgee River Basin, Australia. Forest Ecology and Management, 251, 82–93.

Chiew FHS. 2010. Lumped conceptual rainfall-runoff models and simple water balance methods: overview and applications in ungauged and data limited regions. Geography Compass. 4: 206–225, doi:10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00318.x.

Chiew FHS, Teng J, Vaze J, Post DA, Perraud J-M, Kirono DGC and Viney NR. 2009. Estimating climate change impact on runoff across south-east Australia: method, results and implications of modelling method. Water Resources Research. 45. W10414, doi:10.1029/2008WR007338.

Petheram, C., Bristow, K.L., and Nelson, P. (2008). Understanding and managing groundwater and salinity in a tropical conjunctive water use irrigation district. Agricultural Water Management, 95 (no. 10): 1167-1179. doi:10.1016/j.agwat.2008.04.016 .

Petheram C, McMahon TA and Peel MC. 2008.  Flow characteristics of tropical rivers: a continental scale analysis of river flow data from Northern Australia. Journal of Hydrology. 357: 93–111.

Petheram C, McMahon TA, Peel M and Smith C. 2010. A continental scale assessment of Australia’s potential for irrigation. Water Resources Research. 124: 1791–1817.

Vaze J, Post DA, Chiew FHS, Perraud JM, Viney N, Teng J. 2010. Climate nonstationarity - Validity of calibrated rainfall-runoff models for use in climate change studies. Journal of Hydrology. 394: 447–457. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2010.09.018.

Vaze J and Teng J. 2011. Future climate and runoff projections across New South Wales, Australia – results and practical applications. Hydrological Process. 25: 18–35. doi: 10.1002/hyp.7812.

Viney BR, Bates BC, Charles SP, Webster IT and Bormans M. 2007. Modelling adaptive management strategies for coping with the impacts of climate variability and change on riverine algal blooms. Global Change Biology. 13: 2453–2465.

Viney NR, Bormann H, Breuer L, Bronstert A, Croke BFW et al. 2009. Assessing the impact of land use change on hydrology by ensemble modelling (LUCHEM): II. Ensemble combinations and predictions. Advances in Water Resources. 32: 147–158.

Zhang L, Potter N, Hickel K, Zhang YQ and Shao QX. 2008. Water balance modelling over variable time scales based on the Budyko framework: I. Model development and testing. Journal of Hydrology. 360: 117–131. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2008.07.021.

Zhang YQ and Chiew FHS. 2009. Relative merits of different methods for runoff predictions in ungauged catchments. Water Resources Research. 45. W07412, doi:10.1029/2008WR007504.

Zhang YQ, Chiew FHS, Zhang L and Li HX. 2009. Use of remotely sensed actual evapotranspiration to improve rainfall-runoff modelling in southeast Australia. Journal of Hydrometeorology. 10: 969–980. doi:10.1175/2009JHM1061.1.

Zhang YQ, Chiew FHS, Zhang L, Leuning R and Cleugh HA. 2008. Estimating catchment evaporation and runoff using MODIS leaf area index and the Penman-Monteith equation. Water Resources Research. 44. W10420, doi:10.1029/2007WR006563.

Zhao F, Zhang L, Xu Z and Scott DF (2010)  Evaluation of methods for estimating the effects of vegetation change and climate variability on streamflow. Water Resources Research, 46, W03505, doi:10.1029/2009WR007702.

Read more about the Surface Water Hydrology research program.