In many places there is evidence that some water users will sell off the surface water they are entitled to, but then make greater use of groundwater to satisfy their water needs. And, because surface water and groundwater […]
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Analysis by researchers at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, have found areas in the Murray-Darling Basin suitable for long term underground water storage and could help build drought resilience. Water banking – known more technically as managed aquifer […]
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Over half the world’s rivers- and over 70% of Australia’s rivers- go dry for part of each year. During these dry periods, pools of water along the river channels (also called billabongs, springs, or even wetlands) act as […]
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The world’s drinking water faces a new threat, with the largest study of its kind finding that climate change and increasing urbanisation are contaminating the aquifers that sustain more than half of the world’s population. A study led […]
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Groundwater is the drinking water source for more than two billion people in the world, and provides over 40% of water for irrigated agriculture. Yet in many parts of the world groundwater has become depleted or polluted, risking […]
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A lack of guidelines around groundwater modelling has led to inaccurate and unreliable results, a new paper has found. In Australia, groundwater makes up about 17% of accessible water and accounts for more than 30% of the country’s […]
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Drought is in the news here in New South Wales, Australia. But how are rainfall, drought and groundwater related? First, we need to understand what drought is. Is it a water shortage? Or a lack of rainfall? Or […]
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Groundwater serves as the primary source of drinking water for more than 3 billion people around the world. The year-round availability and low infrastructure requirements like major dams and canals, made groundwater irrigation a convenient choice for farmers. […]
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Like numerous basin aquifers in Australia and around the world, the Adelaide Plains aquifers contain water derived from adjacent mountains – the Mount Lofty Ranges in this case. The reason is simple: mountains typically benefit from higher precipitation […]
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Land-based plants take up CO2 from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. This is called the terrestrial carbon sink, and it’s responsible for slowing the increase of atmospheric CO2. In 2011 there was a large global terrestrial […]
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As Cape Town counts down to “day zero” and the prospect of its taps being turned off, there have inevitably been questions about whether the same fate might befall a major Australian city. The most striking parallels have been […]
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A new study has found that trajectory analysis improves the consistency of land cover mapping time series, and thereby achieves better consistency in water balance estimates. The research was conducted by a team of scientists from Australia and Belgium, using […]
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The Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems Atlas (GDE Atlas) now includes new regional-scale mapping for parts of New South Wales, Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria. The web application also has a fresh look with new functionality including powerful searches and new […]
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Water—or the lack of it!—is always a topic of interest to Australians, living and working as we do on the driest inhabited continent on Earth. TERN’s integrated ecosystem-observing infrastructure produces open data on multiple phenomena at the same […]
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Surface irrigation water demand in the northern Murray-Darling Basin can be better accounted when using remotely-sensed irrigation extent and rates of actual evapotranspiration in hydrologic modelling, both in terms of magnitude and temporal patterns. In their recent study […]
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Ecosystems dependent on groundwater can suffer from changes in groundwater availability, for example due to pumping. However, groundwater can be found at some depth below most ecosystems, which makes it challenging to determine which ecosystems should be regarded to be dependent on […]
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