Andy Baker

A couple of years ago, a group of us received Australian Research Council funding to establish a new national capability to measure groundwater replenishment (technically known as recharge).

Typically, groundwater recharge is estimated as a volume of water that has reached the groundwater over a month, year, or sometimes an unknown period of time.

Our approach was different: we decided to use underground spaces between the surface and the water table. Places like tunnels, mines and caves, where we could use automatic loggers to detect water moving from the surface to the groundwater. We could detect individual recharge events, which means that we can determine how much rainfall is needed for recharge for each to take place. And how that varies over time, between locations with different climate, geology and vegetation.

The Open Access paper that describes the network and our approach is now published in the journal Geoscientific Information, Methods and Data Systems:

https://gi.copernicus.org/articles/13/117/2024/

co-authored with Wendy Timms (Deakin University), Margaret Shanafield (Flinders University), Stacey Priestly (CSIRO) and at UNSW, Martin Andersen and Marilu Melo Zurita.

The data from the network is available at https://groundwater.unsw.edu.au/

Why not advocate for a national network in your country?