Where is All the Water?

The Challenge

Water is a valuable and limited natural resource. Agriculture, the environment and metropolitan water all compete for a share of surface and ground water resources in NSW. These demands are dynamic - growing populations, changing land use and climate change are placing increasing pressure on our state’s water resources.

Managing this resource in an integrated manner requires an accurate understanding of where water is and how it moves. Although we have a good understanding of many aspects of water there are gaps in our knowledge. The availability of new and emerging sensing technologies and data analysis techniques will enable us to increase certainty in the information we do have and obtain new information to fill the gaps in our knowledge.

The Solution

This project aimed to develop a technology framework and roadmap that will ultimately enable evidence-based, integrated management of water resources in NSW. The approach was to combine existing data sets with the latest developments in low-cost sensing, quantum gravity sensing, gravity data sets and data fusion techniques to address gaps in our current knowledge of water location and movement in NSW, thus addressing the issue of “Where is All the Water?’

Industry Partners

University Partners