Track and Save That Water to Survive Drought.

Rethink on farm dam design may be necessary
Farm onLine Australia
Tuesday, 17 October 2006

This item highlight new research on night-time evaporation from farm dams will more than likely force a significant rethink on their design and construction, to ensure more efficient storages.

The Farm Online reported research has found that night-time evaporation accounts for, an approximate average of 40pc of evaporation losses at many sites.

This far exceeds the previous estimate of night-time evaporation.

The study used the Centre for Water Research's Dynamic Reservoir Simulation Model (DYRESM).

It was conducted by Matthew Hipsey from the Centre for Water Research at the University of Western Australia.


Tracing water to root zone
Farm On Line Australia
Tuesday, 17 October 2006

A research device for measuring the drainage of water from under the root zone of plants, a lysimeter, has been installed at the Australian Cotton Research Institute (ACRI) at Narrabri, NSW.

The lysimeter is part of a Cotton CRC research project funded by numerous organisations, including the Cotton Research and Development Corporation, which is attempting to measure the water that is lost to the plant and hence wasted.

The research team leader, Anthony Ringrose-Voase, a soil scientist with CSIRO Land and Water in Canberra, said the prime aim is to get a quantitative and precise handle on exactly how much water is wasted.

A secondary objective is to use the data collected as a benchmark to test simpler, more practical and cheaper methods that can be used much more widely in the cotton industry.

A third objective is to use the data to develop models specific to individual soil types and management systems to predict water balance results over decades.

“In dryland systems because drainage is much lower, you may be looking at losses from near zero under native vegetation up to maybe 50–100mm under cropping. Under irrigated systems it is a lot greater than that, so you may be looking at over hundreds of millimetres a year.”