The River Murray near Blanchtown, South Australia.

Hydrologists workbench

The Hydrologists Workbench project is part of the Water Information Research and Development Alliance between CSIRO's Water for a Healthy Country Flagship and the Bureau of Meteorology.

• 4 March 2010 | Updated 14 October 2011

• Project summary
• Objective
• Key research deliverables
• Partner

Project summary

Water scarcity is a major challenge facing Australia. The need to accurately monitor, assess and forecast the availability, condition and use of water resources is now more vital than ever.

A key component of the Water Information Research and Development Alliance is developing the Hydrologists Workbench to enable the Bureau of Meteorology’s hydrologists to easily perform tasks that involve hydrological model integration.

The Hydrologists Workbench project will provide common work processes and technical interfaces to hydrological data and models. 

Objective

Producing national water accounts and assessments requires the development and execution of integrated modelling workflows.

The Hydrologists Workbench project will develop a framework that addresses the difficulty in integrating hydrological models together while also being able to undertake large scale water resource assessments.

The Hydrologists Workbench will provide a services-based, hydrological modelling platform that draws upon the new technologies of web services and scientific workflows to provide a solution to model integration.

Key research deliverables

From 2009 to 2012, the Hydrologists Workbench project will roll out an integrated hydrological modelling desktop application that will provide:

• the ability to discover and visualise spatio-temporal data from the Australian Water Resource Information System (AWRIS) and other sources
• interfaces to external services and workbenches that manipulate and visualise hydrological data
• interfaces to hydrological models to allow integrated modelling tasks to be easily generated and executed
• the ability to save tasks to be rerun at a later date, thus providing the benefits of repeatability, transparency and auditability.

Partner

The research alliance brings together Water for a Healthy Country’s leading expertise in water and information sciences with the Bureau of Meteorology’s operational role in hydrologic analysis and prediction.

The Bureau of Meteorology is drawing on CSIRO research expertise to improve the information available to Australia’s water industry and increase its capacity to manage our water resources.

Find out more about the Hydrologists Workbench fact sheet project [fact sheet 484 KB, PDF] and the Water Information Research and Development Alliance.