Archived Industry News for Water Professionals - July, 2011
The South Australian Government has released its Stormwater Strategy, developed by the Stormwater Taskforce which was established in September last year.
The strategy, The Future of Stormwater Management, contains nine actions to be implemented over the next four years to improve the capture and reuse of stormwater in Adelaide and recommends a more unified approach between all the responsible parties – Government, the Local Government Association and the Stormwater Management Authority.
ACCC sets water infrastructure pricing principles for the Murray-Darling Basin
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has released pricing principles for price approvals and determinations made under the Water Charge (Infrastructure) Rules (WCIR).
Decreasing rainfall due to drop in storm intensity
Decreasing autumn and winter rainfall over southern Australia has been attributed to a 50-year decrease in the average intensity of storms in the region – a trend which is forecast to continue for another 50 years.
eWater CRC releases new Urban Developer tool
The eWater CRC has achieved a major breakthrough by allowing users to simulate the way human behaviour impacts household water use, with the release of Urban Developer, a new tool to support Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM), after a successful beta testing period.
Traditional models of the urban water system require the user to specify demand as an input to the modelling system. Urban Developer offers a major step forward, with the incorporation of a demand estimation component – the Behavioural end-use stochastic simulator (BESS) – developed by Mark Thyer, a senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide, and colleagues.
The power of the BESS framework lies in its incorporation of algorithms which estimate an individual household’s use of common household water-using appliances. The framework provides probabilistic simulations of water consumption from individual end-uses such as shower, toilet and washing machine at the individual household scale at sub-daily time steps (hour or minute).
A further enhancement under development will model the way weather affects outdoor water use. The prototype model for outdoor water use, incorporating the behavioural impact of weather drivers on outdoor water use variability on the individual household, is currently being refined for inclusion in future releases.
“Urban water use is changing,” Thyer says. “Smart-metering and other detailed water use monitoring projects are continually improving our understanding of urban water use. With this in mind, BESS has been designed with a flexible and generic framework that enables it to be updated in the future. This provides Urban Developer users with the additional future benefit that, as knowledge of urban water use improves, the BESS framework can incorporate this new knowledge to provide improved estimates of urban water use and improved reliability of water savings from integrated urban water management design solutions.
“The benefit of the BESS framework is that it will enable users of Urban Developer to estimate the impact on demand at the household scale of changes in uptake of water efficient appliances and household occupancy,” Thyer says.
Research overturns conventional ideas of ocean circulation
Research at the University of Melbourne and the Bureau of Meterology has overturned conventional ideas of ocean circulation.
Seawater properties defined
An international science team led by Dr Trevor McDougall of the CSIRO Wealth from Ocean Flagship has developed a new thermodynamic definition of seawater properties which has been accepted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.
Call for stormwater harvesting and reuse projects
Applications have been called for the third round of the Federal Government’s stormwater harvesting and reuse grants under the National Urban Water and Desalination Plan.
Scientists express doubts about Murray-Darling Basin Plan
A letter signed by eight leading ecologists, all members of the Australian Academy of Science, has expressed concern that there is a lack of scientific input to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s (MDBA) water plan.