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Water Intelligence Success Stories from Australia
• Ed Quilty
In my last post, I announced the winners of the 2016 AQUARIUS Impact Awards. I congratulated Chris Smith, Water Resource Analyst at Murrumbidgee Irrigation for his outstanding achievements with AQUARIUS Time-Series:
"For the first time in the company's 100+ year history, AQUARIUS has provided Murrumbidgee Irrigation with a solid warehouse and analytical tool for our hydrological data. It provides a source of truth and level of confidence that we have needed to move forward as a leader in our industry. With greater confidence in our data, we build greater confidence in our business decisions."
Today, while I visit our customers in Australia, I'd like to celebrate the country's very progressive water monitoring practices.
In many ways, Australia is one of the most advanced countries in the world when it comes to monitoring water.
The country has invested heavily in modern hydrological monitoring networks. Station density is high relative to other countries – in Australia they capture more continuous water data per square kilometer than certainly Canada or the United States. They are certainly collecting big water data Down Under.
Australia was also one of the first countries to adopt commercial off the shelf (COTS) water data management software. In Australia COTS adoption started nearly 30 years ago, while many other countries today still primary rely on spreadsheets or custom in-house solutions (which are now also showing their age).
As more and more water monitoring organizations in Australia modernize to our integrated AQUARIUS platform, I'm thrilled to hear their success stories in producing better quality data and in making water data management decisions with the highest confidence.
Today, I'd like to highlight the success story that Mike Ross shared with us. Mike is a Specialist Systems Engineer with Entura – one of the world's most experienced specialist power and water consulting firms. As part of Hydro Tasmania, Australia's largest renewable energy producer and water manager, Entura is backed by more than 100 years of creating energy and maintaining power and water assets.
Entura is working on lots of exciting hydrological modelling and forecasting projects at the moment.
Here is one of their success stories on improved flood management and dam safety …
"Entura were contracted to deliver a new Early Warning System for Parkes Shire Council for Endeavour dam. The aim of this project was to provide the operators of the dam with a heads-up of potential spill events that could cause downstream flooding.
This involved replacing an existing 90's era telemetry and SCADA system with new telemetry sites, with rainfall sites built to BoM/WMO standards, and with Entura's own SCADA system to capture the data into a cloud based repository. This data is combined with observations and gridded rainfall forecast data from the BoM ready for the modelling process.
Flood forecast models were built in AQUARIUS Forecast to predict the potential inflows and dam levels. AQUARIUS Forecast was used for the modelling as the flexible environment, which allowed a continuous rainfall-runoff model to be built and customised for the catchment and storage. The model was run in real-time with direct inputs to the model from the AQUARIUS Time-Series database, and forecast outputs written back to the database.
The resulting outputs of the model were then synchronised back into the cloud where the dam operators could view the data alongside the real-time observation data, via a customised online dashboard.
Entura used an in-house integration package called the Ajenti Data Bridge to facilitate data transfer in and out of AQUARIUS Time-Series, and to manage the execution of the AQUARIUS Forecast models. This allowed for a fully managed and monitored modelling solution, with model outputs available online instantly after model runs were completed, and the performance of the system carefully monitored for issues.
The data collected and the output from the modelling system are made available to the operators of the dam to assist in the forecasting of potential flood events, providing up to 7 days lead time for the activation of flood management plans. Alarms sent via SMS are used to notify operators of potential events as soon as the forecast is available.
Data is also simplified and made publicly available to residents to keep them informed of current and forecast levels. This has enabled Parkes Shire Council to reduce the risk associated with flooding and to meet their dam safety management obligations."
The AQUARIUS Impact Awards are designed to celebrate the outstanding work our customers do everyday to turn massive volumes of water data into insight to support better water data management decisions. Stay tuned, as I will be sharing more of our customer success stories.
One response to "Water Intelligence Success Stories from Australia"
RMAU June 3, 2016 at 5:41 pm
A group of researchers concluded that 'hydropeaking' of water flows on many rivers in the West has a devastating impact on aquatic insect abundance.
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Tags: AQUARIUS Impact Awards, Australia, entura, hydro tasmania, Hydrological Monitoring, Murrumbidgee Irrigation
Water News
Community Advice to Young Hydrologists, Part 1
This blog post is a fantastic insight into the minds of the most influential hydrologists in the world today. The question: "WHAT BOOK OR PAPER HAS BEEN MOST INFLUENTIAL TO YOUR CAREER AND WHY?" was posed to senior hydrologists all over the world and the answers run from the predictable (Groundwater by Freeze and Cherry), the unexpected (House at Pooh Corner), classic (The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses), eclectic (Slowness) to difficult (Scale of Fluctuation of Rainfall Models). Out of this broad range of influential reading, it is the explanation of why a particular body of work made a difference in a career path that is most illuminating. I particularly like the quote provided by Gregory Pastenack: "Show me a person who has read a thousand books and I'll show you my best friend; show me a person who has read but one and I will show you my worst enemy." Happy reading.
– Stu Hamilton
Making Better Sense of the Mosaic of Environmental Measurement Networks: A System-of-Systems Approach and Quantitative Assessment
The intent of this paper is to develop a system of diverse observation systems for the purpose of ground-truthing satellite observation systems. The challenge is that while it is possible to develop methods to identify incorrect data, the residue is not necessarily all correct data. Confidence in the data has to come from attributes such as whether the data source is well documented, well understood, representative, updated, publicly available, and maintains rich metadata. If broadly adopted, the system-of-systems approach will have potential benefits in guiding users to the most appropriate set of observations for their needs and in highlighting to network owners and operators areas for potential improvement.
Murky Waters: Taking a Snapshot of Freshwater Sustainability in BC
This statement: "There's a huge opportunity here to improve data collection, monitoring, and reporting. Reliable data would help governments, funders, and non-profits to track progress, make better decisions, and coordinate their efforts" is from Jack Wong, the CEO of the Real Estate Foundation of BC. The recommendations of this study include: "Regular public opinion surveys on freshwater attitudes (…) conducted by a cross-section of water partners to ensure long-term availability of the data"; "A multi-faceted solution (…) involving diverse groups that gather water data to increase the quantity and quality of data and improve data accessibility"; "This report shows a huge opportunity to convene relevant players and discuss solutions for freshwater sustainability data collection, monitoring, and reporting. If successfully implemented, communities across the province will be more informed and better stewards of BC's most precious resource."
Attributing Changing Rates of Temperature Record-Breaking to Anthropogenic Influences
Attribution of cause to effect in natural environments is a difficult problem. It is one thing to be able to use monitoring data to say what is happening. It is much more challenging to say why it is happening. While difficult, attribution is important. Without compelling attribution, there are deeply entrenched reasons to stay the course and not make the changes necessary to achieve better outcomes. I am interested to know if the relatively simple method used in this paper for attribution of cause to extreme temperatures could be applied for other types of data. For example, wouldn't it be good to have compelling attribution of cause for harmful algal blooms?
U.S. Government Global Water Strategy 2017
This report makes a compelling argument about how looking after water is in the best strategic interests of the United States. It is better to anticipate predictable problems and take relatively inexpensive actions (e.g. wise use of data to influence proactive measures) to avoid or mitigate challenges to human health and economic development, both of which must be managed to ensure peace and security.
Designing the Climate Observing System of the Future
Print this article and put it on the desk of the senior administrators in your water monitoring agency. The arguments made here that climate observation networks offer a magnified return on investment all hold true for water monitoring as well. "Climate change is but one example of the need to make decisions under deep uncertainty. Developing new approaches to decision making that go beyond traditional point and probabilistic predictions is the focus of a new scientific undertaking. Developing adaptation pathways that will be robust under many possible futures will in part require observing systems that are designed with these needs in mind." "The economic value of such a system at ~ $10 trillion dollars to the world economy in today's value (known as "net present value" in economics using a 3% discount rate). In the simplest sense, this is the economic value of moving climate scientific understanding forward 15 to 20 years by using better observations, analysis, and modeling capabilities. The studies further estimated that if the world tripled its current economic investments in climate research (observations, analysis, modeling) to achieve such an advanced observing system, the return on investment would be ~ $50 for every $1 invested by society."
WMO: 2017 Is Set to Be In Top Three Hottest Years, With Record-Breaking Extreme Weather
The average global temperature from January to September 2017 was approximately 1.1°C above the pre-industrial era. The years of 2013-2017 are set to be the warmest five-year period on record. The past three years have all been in the top three years in terms of temperature records. The WMO statement is based on five independently maintained global temperature data sets. The rate of increase in CO2 from 2015 to 2016 was the highest on record, 3.3 parts per million/year, reaching 403.3 parts per million.
Citizen Science for Hydrological Risk Reduction and Resilience Building
This paper affirms the central theme of my whitepaper "Improving Outcomes for Freshwater Availability, Security and Sustainability: Water Data Asset Management as a Strategic Investment." The key to good governance is well-informed stakeholders. Water monitoring best serves public interests when data is managed as a strategic asset.
Where Does the Water in Streams Come From When It Rains?
I like this blog post for how it explains catchment processes as a lead-in to explaining the value of isotope hydrology. I think this approach is a good one for anyone in monitoring to remember when explaining what we do and why we do it. Start with the why and end with the what.
A Multi-Scaled Geospatial and Temporal Database of Lake Ecological Context and Water Quality for Thousands of U.S. Lakes
An integrated database of data from 51,101 lakes in the northeast United States has been developed to assist with the problems arising from too many disperse and limited data sources. Three decades of data can now be discovered in its location and context (i.e. land use, geologic, climatic, and hydrologic settings). The database contains 150,000 measures of total phosphorus, 200,000 measures of chlorophyll, and 900,000 measures of Secchi depth.
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