A new river system modelling tool for sustainable operational management of water resources

Abstract

The eWater Cooperative Research Centre of Australia has developed a river system modelling software called eWater Source that can be used to assist water managers and river operators in planning and operating river systems. It has been designed and developed within Australia to provide a consistent approach to underpin a wide range of water planning and management purposes. The software provides tools for the prediction and quantification of water from catchments to the end of a river system by integrating continuous rainfall-runoff and river system models. It includes three modes (catchment runoff, river management and river operations) for different applications. This paper introduces the operations mode of Source and compares its functionality with the existing tools used for daily river operations in Australia, with the Goulburn River as the case study. A 5-year period is used to compare modelled and observed results. Forecasts from Source and the existing tools are compared to observations over 7-day forecast periods that include an environmental water release. Source provided acceptable or improved results and required less user input than the existing method. Source provides a flexible software tool in which various forecast models can be incorporated. The application has demonstrated the potential of Source to provide an improvement on the existing river operations models in Australia at both the daily and seasonal time steps.