Warrick Dawes

Biography

Warrick is a Senior Experimental Scientist in the Water for Regional Development team in the CSIRO Environment Research Unit. His work has focussed on groundwater recharge at the point to regional scales, with implications for groundwater levels, dryland salinity, and vegetation response.

Warrick’s work has spanned nearly four-decades, starting with dryland salinisation in the Murray-Darling Basin and the wheatbelt of Western Australia. During this time he developed the FLOWTUBE tool, a simple representation of groundwater flow in one-dimension allowing rapid evaluation of changes in recharge and discharge in slowly changing systems. He is also the principal developer of the WAVES model, a comprehensive one-dimensional vertical water-balance model, including interactions between climate forcing and vegetation response, salt in the rootzone, and groundwater level. Warrick has provided both surface and groundwater modelling skills to the Sustainable Yields projects undertaken by CSIRO in the Murray-Darling Basin, northern Australia and the Swan Coastal Plain in Western Australia.