International recognition for our WRON initiative

A vast country facing issues of water supply and demand, with hundreds of water agencies not used to cooperating or sharing information and resources...

While this sounds like some of the issues the Water for a Healthy Country Flagship team face building an Australian Water Resources Observation Network (WRON), it happens to be the picture painted by David Maidment of problems his colleagues in the United States are currently tackling.

Maidment, Director of the Center for Research in Water Resources at the University of Texas at Austin, was recently in Canberra (Nov. '06) to share knowledge with CSIRO staff collaborating on the WRON, and to jointly host a briefing on WRON development for the Australian Government and water industry at CSIRO's Black Mountain laboratories.

As head of the Hydrologic Information System (HIS) program of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc (CUAHSI), Maidment and colleagues from 116 universities across the US are working on issues such as the collection and housing of water data information.

The issues facing Maidment's CUAHSI colleagues echo the Australian situation –some states share and collaborate with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to collect and house water data information, while many other states choose their own methods and locations for collection and storage, with few arrangements in place to share information between states.

The recently developed CUAHSI website pulls this hydrologic information from sources including the USGS (US Geological Survey), EPA, NCDC (National Climatic Data Center), NASA, NWS, while compiling observatory data with a common data window for viewing and accessing information.

The site grew out of a review of the USGS National Water Use Information Program, conducted by the National Academy of Sciences and Chaired by Maidment, which surveyed water use data collection in all 50 US states.

The team have made accessible very detailed geospatial data across the US, with 2.3 million 'reaches' captured (a reach is about 2kms of catchment), with figures available for slope, elevation, mean annual flow, drainage area, percentage of upstream drainage area in different land uses and stream order.

The next hurdle they face is inventing the language and building the infrastructure to take this data to the next level, providing what they call the ‘Digital Watershed' (which we refer to as a catchment in Australia) that makes available online information on hydrovolumes, stream channel bedforms and 3D representations of groundwater, with real-time hydrologic observation data, geospatial data, remote sensing data, and weather and climate data into a connected database for a hydrologic region.

"The advancement of water science is critically dependant on the integration of water information," Maidment said to the assembly at CSIRO's Black Mountain campus, "and we are at a remarkable time when a national data infrastructure for water resources can be created, using standardised geographic data models to inventory the physical water landscape, and linking geospatial and temporal information into a single system."

Drawing on Maidment's experiences in the US, CLW Chief Rob Vertessy set the scene for the future of Australia's water resources, while CLW Environmental Sensing Prediction and Reporting Theme Leader Stuart Minchin discussed the technical challenges our staff face in making a Water Resources Observation Network a reality.

The National Water Commission's Colin Chartres led two discussion sessions with many of Australia's key water industry players present, including those from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, eWater CRC and various irrigation bodies sharing their own thoughts.

In a time when the future of Australia's water resources makes almost daily headlines, the afternoon was both timely and focusing for our WRON team, giving them food for thought as they make progress delivering on the National Research Priority of developing an Environmentally Sustainable Australia.

Cris Kennedy

View Rob Vertessy's address Australia's water resources information imperative and the role of the WRON [PDF, 5MB]

View David Maidment's presentation Hydrologic Information in the United States [PDF, 4.7MB]

View David Maidment's presentation HIS-Australia: Building a National Hydrologic Information System for Australia [PDF, 3.4MB]

View Stuart Minchin's address WRON Technology [PDF, 2.7MB]

For more information on the WRON, visit www.wron.net.au or contact

Contact: Ross Ackland: 02 6216 7044 Ross.Ackland@csiro.au
 

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