Science Wednesday: coupled groundwater and streamflow forecasts

Today’s 9-minute video by Guobin Fu takes us to the supply side of irrigated agriculture. A substantial portion of irrigation water in Australia is extracted from groundwater, but our forecasts of water supply only cover streamflow. Guobin and his team have constructed a rapid prototype of a model for simultaneously forecasting the distributions of future groundwater and streamflow levels. The forecast skills they obtained for groundwater levels are encouraging, to say the least.

Note Guobin’s passing mentions of:

• CSIRO’s Drought Resilience Mission: part of what we were doing was exploring how Future Science Platform research might feed into CSIRO’s Missions portfolio, and
• copula-based rainfall downscaling of seasonal climate forecasts, which I anticipate returning to this another Wednesday