Objectives
The Great Artesian Basin is the only reliable source of water for many graziers in remote areas of Australia and recent drought has caused considerable stress. In some areas, concerns about groundwater pressures are amplified by mining and unconventional gas operations. Although water extraction for stock and domestic use accounts for the majority of consumptive water use in the Basin, stock and domestic bores are rarely metered and current water resource planning and management relies on modelled estimates of stock and domestic water use. To support improved estimates, a program of metering was implemented in 2015 to obtain high resolution extraction data for stock and domestic bores in the Surat and Bowen basins.
Design and Methodology
The metering program involved deploying ultrasonic flow meters to 42 bores used for stock water supply. Roll out of the program posed many challenges including identifying landholders willing to participate, identifying bores in accessible locations with suitable infrastructure for metering, designing equipment to minimise animal damage and data cleansing. Since the presentation of this project at the 2017 AGC, additional data on type of beef cattle operation, stocking rates, bore purpose, bore infrastructure and other available water sources have been provided by landholders; and two more years of extraction data are available so that water use dynamics can be seen, including during the dry conditions that prevailed throughout the region in 2018.
Original data and results
The presentation will describe the project approach and how the quantitative and qualitative data have improved understanding of property-scale water demand and spatial and temporal variability of groundwater extractions for stock and domestic use in the Surat and Bowen basins.
Conclusion
The program has provided an important data set to improve methods for estimating stock and domestic water use in the Basin and to understand inter-annual and inter-property variability.