Posted 6 October 2016
CWI team members presented their research at the recent 43rd annual congress Hydrogeology Congress in Montpellier, France.
The event, which was organised by the French and German chapters of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH) and was themed Groundwater and society: 60 years of IAH, attended by more than 700 representatives of groundwater management and research from across the globe.
Among the attendees representing CWI, Cameron Holley presented on Water markets, regulation and groundwater – insights from Australia; Scott Cook presented on Integrating hydrographic and hydrochemical data using a multivariate statistical approach: A case study in an Australian alluvial aquifer-aquitard systemandWendy Timms presented on Conceptual models of risks to shallow waters associated with underground mining through geological fault structures (click here for poster).
Wendy also participated in a Energy and Groundwater workshop in which groundwater challenges associated with extraction of shale gas, coal seam gas, and mining of coal and uranium were discussed by participants from the United Kingdom, Canada, United States, Japan and Australia.
The results of the election of the international council of IAH were declared during the congress. The new IAH President is Professor António Chambel of Portugal. Wendy Timms was re-elected as an IAH Vice President, representing Australasia-Pacific.
In July 2017, UNSW will host the Australasian Groundwater Conference, a joint event between IAH and the NCGRT.
The management of withdrawals of ground water in the Central West remains an area of hotly-contested debate. Associate Professor of Hydrogeology Bryce Kelly has spent over a decade studying groundwater in the Central West, and has credited groundwater with “saving rural communities from collapse”, but its potential for future drought-proofing depends on how successfully it’s managed. He says current withdrawals “will only be sustainable if the Narromine region gets flooded frequently enough to balance the volume of groundwater extracted."
The UNSW-GWI Global Water Matters Podcast was launched in 2020 to share interesting and important water-related developments and insights from global experts across the broad spectrum of water-related disciplines. Born from the demand to continue the Water Issues Commentary seminar series under the constraints of social distancing, new episodes are released monthly.
During the past decade, water levels in the Thirlmere Lakes have varied from full in 2016 to completely dry between October 2018 and February 2020. These variations have raised concerns with the local community and left them wondering; "Where has all the water gone in Thirlmere Lakes?"
Thirlmere Lakes National Park, located south-west of Sydney in an ancient river meander, contains five lakes – Lake Gandangarra, Lake Werri Berri, Lake Couridjah, Lake Baraba, and Lake Nerrigorang.
Two WRL research teams (EcoEng and Connected Waters) have investigated the water balance budget and surface-groundwater interaction in Thirlmere Lakes. These investigations were supported by coordinated research projects with ANSTO, University of Wollongong, and the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and the Environment (DPIE). In collaboration with these groups, WRL engineers undertook extensive fieldwork between 2017 and 2020 to monitor the site, including remote sensing bathymetry surveys, deploying micro-meteorological stations for measuring evapotranspiration, and installing a piezometer network for groundwater investigations.
Read more about the research findings here.
Subsidised irrigators extracted up to 28 per cent more water than those who received no funds under a national Murray-Darling Basin irrigation efficiency program, a new study has found.
Groundwater – a vital source of water for drinking and irrigation across sub-Saharan Africa – is resilient to climate variability and change, according to a new study.
