Murray-Darling

Understanding Evaporation

Right now, it is very diffi cult to accurately measure the water losses from evaporation on farm dams but a recent scoping study funded by the National Program for Sustainable Irrigation estimated the loss is as high as 7,000 gigalitres per year from Queensland’s section of the Murray-Darling Basin alone. Given that water extracted from our waterways for all purposes is around 20,000 gigalitres per annum in the whole of Australia, the potential savings from addressing evaporation losses are obviously (more)...

Salinity impact on Lower Murray horticulture

The project was developed to test the hypothesis: ‘a depressed leaching efficiency (LE) in the Lower Murray irrigation districts raises the root zone salinity and, improved water use efficiency (WUE) has an upper limit determined by that field’s LE and its variance’. The specific objectives were to: Determine/update the salinity relationships for irrigated horticulture along the Lower (more)...

Waterwheel Newsletter 12