Posted 9 February 2017
Dr Halloran delivers his keynote address at the WIS Forum
Connected Waters Initiative research fellow Dr Landon Halloran was a keynote speaker at the Water Institute for Sustainability Forum in Bangkok, Thailand in January 2017.
The event, held on the 24-26 of January at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre, was organised by the Federation of Thai Industries in honour of the late King Bhumibol.
Day Two of the conference was dedicated to international water management issues and also included talks by representatives from the Netherlands and Israel.
Landon’s invited keynote address, entitled Groundwater management in Australia: a research perspective, kicked off the day. The talk introduced the wide-ranging water research capabilities of the UNSW Global Water Institute to the Thai audience and provided a background on fundamental water issues in Australia. Several examples of cutting-edge groundwater research from the Connected Waters Initiative Research Centre were also presented, including passive methods to evaluate aquifer confinement and subsidence risk, investigations into the connectivity of CSG and groundwater using isotopes, and temperature-based tools for evaluating groundwater-surface water interactions and the vadose zone.
While in Bangkok, Landon also met with hydrogeologists and groundwater researchers at government departments and leading Thai universities to learn about current groundwater challenges in Thailand and establish collaborative partnerships.
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.
