Lake Eyre is one of Australia’s most iconic wetlands, home to thousands of waterbirds that migrate from all over Australia and the world. But it is often dry for decades between floods. Many people think wetlands are swamps […]
Read more
The inaugural OzFlux-AsiaFlux Conference was held in Darwin this year, hosted by Charles Darwin University’s Research Institute of the Environment and Livelihoods (RIEL). The conference (OAFlux18) addressed regionally specific issues associated with ecosystems, climate and land use change […]
Read more
Barnaby Joyce, Australia’s new special envoy for drought assistance and recovery, will have to be careful he doesn’t do more harm than good. Government funding of agriculture during a drought typically falls into three categories: subsidies for farm […]
Read more
Streamflow data underpin hydrological and climate change studies. Without such data, it is hard to understand catchment hydrological processes under climate change and non-stationarity. Unfortunately, continuous streamflow data are not always available and most gauges suffer from missing […]
Read more
If you’ve ever walked in a rainforest or even a greenhouse, you’ll know that the air inside is heavy with moisture. This phenomenon is caused by trees releasing water vapour through pores in their leaves called stomata. We […]
Read more
Technology is quickly catching up with water theft and the NSW Government is funding new research projects to monitor water anomalies, as well as water flows. Just a week after the new NSW water regulator announced a number […]
Read more
So far, 2018 has been very warm and exceptionally dry over large parts of mainland Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology’s climate outlook for spring, released today, shows that significant widespread relief is unlikely. The chance of a spring […]
Read more
We hate to rain on your parade, but we have some bad news — you have probably been reading the weather forecast all wrong. The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) forecasts help us make decisions each day about what […]
Read more
My PhD research looks into how we can provide earlier indications of flood hazard at the global scale. One way of doing this is through seasonal forecasts of high (or low) river flow. Seasonal forecasts are designed to […]
Read more
Diverting water earmarked for the environment to help drought-hit farmers would “absolutely” breach the federal Water Act, says David Papps, the former head of the Commonwealth Environment Water Office. Mr Papps was responding to Barnaby Joyce, the former […]
Read more
Version 2 of the Fine-Root Ecology Database is bigger, better, and free to download and use. Fine roots are complex and dynamic structures that serve many critical roles for land plants. Their well-known importance for acquiring water and […]
Read more
“The sky, a great flaming oven. Grass withered; water gone; famine-stricken, blear-eyed bullocks, staggering pathetically … Skeletons and bones everywhere.” So reads a tale of the terrible drought that scorched western Queensland in June 1902. Earlier that year, Sydneysiders […]
Read more
Australia’s rainfall events are already becoming more intense with climate change, raising the risks of flashflooding and potentially exceeding the nation’s engineering codes, a new study finds. While it’s long been understood the atmosphere holds about 6.5 per […]
Read more
Currently, flood risk management practitioners in Australia mostly use event-based models (simulating a single flood event in isolation) as opposed to continuous models (simulating runoff dynamically over time). However, there is a commonly held belief in the hydrology […]
Read more
Hydrologic models are the most important tools for decision makers and scientists to assess water resources availability, risks due to flooding and the health of our waterways. Improving our hydrologic modelling toolbox remains a critical research area, with much […]
Read more
One of the likely effects of rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is an increase in plant water use efficiency. This is due to the expected enhancement of photosynthesis under future atmospheric CO2 concentrations, together with a partial […]
Read more
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. […]
Read more
The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) will lead a major new NCRIS-supported research infrastructure project to allow Australian researchers and policy makers to analyse the next generation of international climate data. The Climate Science Data Enhanced Virtual Laboratory (Climate […]
Read more
Over the 2017-18 summer break, 14 students and early-career researchers from universities around Australia were invited to participate in the second Australian Climate and Water Summer Institute. The fellows had academic backgrounds varying from engineering or spatial science to Earth […]
Read more
Water management and agricultural planning in New South Wales is set to receive a significant boost with 33 new seasonal streamflow forecasting sites coming online. Monitoring these sites allows the Bureau of Meteorology to forecast likely streamflow volumes […]
Read more