Reporting Systems

It will be relatively easy to achieve a single, national reporting interface for water resources observations and forecasts once the foundation data and forecasting components have been completed.

WRON reporting system will support at least four features, including:

• The National Water Account, with continuous live updates
• ‘Choose Your Own’ (end-users build their own customised reports)
• ‘Ask WRON ’ (a general-purpose query interface)
• ‘Control Room’ and public display facilities with high-level visual support

A welcome advance in Water Resources Management

Owing to the large number of agencies involved in the management of land and water resources, the reporting of water resources information in Australia has been piecemeal and generally unsophisticated (with a few notable exceptions – see the Victorian Water Data Warehouse and the New South Wales CANRI sites).

Currently there is no national-level reporting of water resources data other than that collated under the 2000–2001 National Land & Water Resources Audit.

A simple query like ‘how full are all of Australia’s reservoirs today?’ requires separate manual visits to over a dozen different web pages and yields results for only a small fraction of the total number of storages in Australia, with virtually no contextual information.

Likewise, no facility exists to execute a basic query like ‘show me all Australian river segments where the mean daily flow in the last month was below the 10th percentile of all historic flows’.

The public’s ability to ascertain the status of our water resources is about three decades behind where we are presently with climate information. This situation needs to change, starting with a revolution in the way we report water resources information.