Using forecasting and prediction to inform decision making, improve flood routing and water resource system operations

Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW) manages water resources over a region of 68,000 square kilometres across northern Victoria. Its primary role is to harvest, store and deliver water on behalf of customers including irrigators, towns and the environment. It also has delegated responsibility to manage groundwater and surface water resources across its region. Australia's east coast experienced significant rainfall and widespread flooding in 2010/11, with GMW successfully routing several flood events through its storages. After extended drought, the experiences highlighted the need to improve the data available for flood routing operations to inform decision making. Major opportunities lay in improving the ability of GMW staff to forecast operating scenarios, quickly access and easily visualise hydrographic data. Additionally, the inability to instantaneously share monitoring information between staff led to additional workloads in a time critical circumstance. After significant business analysis, the Delft-FEWS application was identified as the most appropriate system for GMW to link forecasting models, inform flood operations and provide the operational overview of hydrographic information needed for day-to-day water resource management. This paper explores how the implementation of a dedicated hydrographic visualisation application has led to a fundamental shift within GMW's river operations. It investigates how improved system integration and real time data sharing assists GMW's flood routing ability and enables rapid adaptive management changes to meet new challenges such as environmental water delivery. Future opportunities resulting from greatly improved information and forecasting availability are discussed. Examples of these opportunities for GMW include using simulation of water releases and harvesting scenarios to reduce the risk of releases worsening floods downstream of storages and improving system efficiency and water savings by modelling the timing of releases to coincide with peak downstream flow events.