increasing the quality and accessibility of water resource information while reducing costs

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Increasing the Quality and Accessibility of Water Resource Information while Reducing CostsGoulburn-Murray Water’s Water Resource Information Management System

“We now have a modernised and contemporary water resources informationmanagement system. Centralised, automatic and continuously available, higher quality data gives us that edge to optimise the management of our precious water resources.”

Daniel LovellWater Data and Systems Manager (2010-2015) Goulburn-Murray WaterAustralia

Abstract

The role of the Water Resources Team of Goulburn-Murray Water is to provide timely and accurate data needed to manage the quality and optimise the use and quality of surface and ground water across a 68,000 km2 catchment. With critical water resource information fragmented across spread sheets, databases and other software systems, they were finding it increasingly difficult to efficiently and effectively fulfil their obligations.

At the same time, the Commonwealth Government’s custodian for environmental water was requiring improved resource management and increasing complex river operations.

Goulburn-Murray Water decided to take a strategic approach to the management of water resource information and engaged Adasa to build a “state of the art” water resource management system. The system was to automatically collect and integrate data from multiple sources into a singletime-series management system and supply that data to many of Goulburn-Murray’s core business systems.

Today, higher data quality and accessibility has resulted in increased use of data across the organisation and a greaterfocus on analysis, modelling and decision making rather than “hind sight” reporting. With reduced manual intervention and streamlined processes, the Water Resources Team is now able to increase the type and amount of data they are processing, without increasing costs.

Benefits

• Higher data quality and accessibility has resulted in increased use of data across the organisation.

• End-user self-service has increased the timeliness of data available to the business and reduced manual intervention and thus cost.

• The quality, timeliness and accessibility has led to an increasing focus on analysis, modelling and decision making rather than “hind sight” reporting.

• Streamlined processes for ingestion and data correction are enabling an increase in type and volume of data without increased costs.

• Sophisticated ratings curve, data quality and audit functions have improved reproducibility and verifiability expected by government agencies but at no additional cost.

Figure 1 - Goulburn-Murray Water Region Map. (www.g-mwater.com.au).

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Increasing the Quality and Accessibility of Water Resource Information while Reducing Costs

One of the Largest Irrigation Districts in the World

Located 200km north of Melbourne, Goulburn-Murray Water (G-MW) is the largest rural water authority in Australia and one of the largest in the world.

G-MW manages water storage, delivery and drainage systems involving 70% of the State of Victoria’s stored water resources, around 50% of Victoria’s underground water supplies and 6300km of irrigation channels, Australia’s largest irrigation delivery system. G-MW manages a complex business supplying water from rivers and aquifers across 68,000km2 (26,000mi2) of catchment, harvests and stores water in 24 dams and delivers water to 39,000 customers including urban water corporations, tourism operators, hydroelectric companies, the environment and more than 14,000 irrigators irrigating 340,000ha (865,000 acres).

Figure 2 - An aerial view of the Darling River near Menindee in the far west of the Murray Darling Basin, in New South Wales. Australia.


Increasing Expectations from Government

In 2007, in recognition of long-term over-exploitation of water resources in the Murray Darling Basin, the Australian Government undertook a suite of national water reforms that included the creation of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder. This body is responsible for protecting and restoring the environmental assets of the Murray-Darling Basin and acquires entitlements and receives allocations of water in the same way as any other water licence holder.

The Water Resources Department of G-MW is responsible for planning, developing, distributing and managing the optimum use, of all surface and groundwater water resources in Northern Victorian. It is also responsible for implementing Government regulations and policy for surface and groundwater, managing water rights trading and water use licensing, and determining the annual allocation of water for all Victorian Murray River water rights holders.

Water resource information is critical for G-MW to undertake these activities: it allows G-MW to understand how much, where, and the quality of water within its area of operations. It includes information such as river flows, water in storages, customer use, meteorological information such as rainfall, evaporation, and forecasts, flood prediction and water quality information including chemical and biological components.

In its role managing environmental flows to ensure environmental sustainability, the Water Holder is raising expectations for improved water resource management by those managing the rivers such as Goulburn-Murray Water and consequently,the information systems that support the management.

Daniel Lovell, Water Data and Systems Manager at Goulburn-Murray Water described the previous situation. “The water resources information system environment had developed in a piecemeal fashion over many years resulting in the emergence of many disparate bespoke systems across the Water Resources department.”

“The systems and information management processes had been developed primarily with either MS Excel or MS Access and varied in quality and suitability”, Daniel added. Like many managers of water resources, during the last few decades spread sheets and small databases had been seen as an agile response to changing regulations or operating practices.

But in their strategic review, the team at G-MW found that the collection of systems had a range of issues and deficiencies including: an inability to ingest some data formats; limited quality assurance and validation during data input; fragmented data storage; a lack of functionality; limited system integration; poor data analysis tools; and a poor reporting environment.

A Strategic Approach to Data Management

Daniel knew a strategic approach was needed and consequently, a complete overhaul of systems. “We decided that we would build a modernised and contemporary Water Resources Information Management System.”

The primary aims of this new system were to:

• Modernise the systems to help the Water Resources Department to fulfil their obligations.

• Make the systems flexible enough to meet future regulatory and customer with existing staff resources.

• Transition to “smarter” systems to reduce human intervention.

• Improve modelling and statistical analysis applications.

• Provide standard and repeatable reports and resource management outputs.

• Improve staff satisfaction and retention.

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“To give you an idea”, Daniel explained, “we had hydrographical information on our catchments and rivers in one system used for reporting to the Bureau of Meteorology, another database for storing sampling data for blue green algae in our storages and another database to store all other water quality sample data. The Salinity Group had a third time-series database for groundwater observation bores or pumps. Chemical analysis at a particular group of 20 sites was kept in a spread sheet and we had government aquifer bore readings delivered in yet another time series management system.”

Turn-key Solution

Adasa was chosen to deliver a turn-key solution, including detailed design, project management, implementation and configuration, data loading and training and change management. The core of the solution consisted of a new Hydrological Time Series Data Management System (HTSDMS), and smart integration with G-MW existing software tools and applications.

Josep Selles, Country Manager for Adasa explains. “The system landscape was very complicated. The new time series database had to provide data to many existing systems including G-MWs graphical information system, their business intelligence framework, a water quality modelling system and an hydrological forecasting and monitoring system. Critically, we also built a two way interface to G-MWs Flood Management System: data was fed to the flood management system and the results of the modelling were stored back into the time-series database for later retrieval.”

The sources of data were no less complex. Software was written to automatically and continuously import data in a variety of formats, from a number of external agencies including the Rural Water Monitoring Partnership, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the Murray Darling Basin Authority and the Victorian Department of Primary Industry. Software was also written to extract data automatically and continuously from internal systems such as Rubicon Water’s SPM and from Campbell Scientific data loggers used by the state-wide monitoring contractor.

Figure 3 - The solution integrates data from many data sources and formats and provides it to important business systems.

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The automatic ingestion of data also included algorithms for automatic error correction and dealing with external data that came in twice: firstly what is called “operational data” and one month later as “verified data”. “We did something quite clever”, explains Josep Selles. “On request from G-MW we created a transparent way for data users to always see only the best available data. For example, before the verified data is available, users see the operational data. This data is then improved by removinggaps or spikes using automatic correction, transparently to users. Later still when the data provider provides verified data, users see that. The data user doesn’t have to be aware of this, because they automatically receive the best available data no matter when they request it.”

As well, having all data consolidated into the time series database meant that a lot of spread sheets and MS Access databases were no longer needed once all their historical information was loaded. Efficiency improved too because some of analytical work previously done in these spread sheets, was able to be done automatically in the time-series database.

Another important feature of the new system is the automatic generation of ratings curves, that is, determining flow rates or volumes from water level readings. Previously these were calculated by G-MW’s software or data suppliers at irregular intervals causing mismatches or jumps in data, reducing confidence in the data. “The new system gives complete control over ratings curves so that when a recalibration of a sensor occurs, or a new cross sectional survey is done, the ratings curves can be automatically updated and shifts can be applied to correct earlier data by phasing in through time to avoid jumps in the calculated hydrograph”, Josep says.

Results

Mike Schulz, Water Resources Project Officer at G-MW is quite clear about the benefits. “I now have data from a dozen internal and external sources in one place and the end users don’t have to worry about where the data comes from”, he said.

“Data quality had always been a problemfor G-MW”, explained Josep Selles. “But now that they automatically flag, and in many cases repair the data, managers make data driven decisions with total confidence. G-MW now have more people using data than ever before.”

More people using data is an important measure of the success of the new system. Apart from quality, the accessibility of the data has been an important influence. A single, simple internal web page gives access to years of historical data in milliseconds and yet is simple enough for casual users to get the data they need without having to make a request to the Water Resources Team to create a formalised report or hydrograph.

About Adasa

Adasa is a global firm dedicated to improving the management of water businesses by leveraging advanced ICT technologies, hydrological modelling, real-time water quality instruments, and the water-related sciences to build systems that improve decision making, enhance efficiency and effectiveness and reduce risk.

Founded in 1988, Adasa is a leader and reference company in Environmental Information Systems operating in 7 countries. Our team of experts understands the increasing need of managing efficiently the rapidly growing amount of water and environmental data in order to realise its full potential value for our clients.

With data integration and quality issues solved, G-MW is now moving up the value chain, making use of the data in ways not previously envisaged. Mike Schulz explains: “One team is now modeling salinity threat and presenting the results in threat maps, and another team, the groundwatergroup, has a huge wish list of how they want to visualize and comprehend the data.”

“We’re also increasing the amount and type of data. The next stage will be to automatically capture water quality results from field visits and external laboratory testing of water samples, so that the same benefits of accessibility and high quality can improve the analysis,compliance reporting, decision making and quality control activities”, Mike added.

An important determinant of this success was Adasa’s expertise. Daniel is happy to acknowledge that Adasa brought a great combination to this project that is hard to find: “Not only are they great at IT but they have a deep and international knowledge of the water industry. Adasa listened and understood, and it was really easy working with them.”

Figure 4 - Improving the accessibility of water information, analysis, compliance reporting, decision making and quality control activities.