Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemTowards Understanding Evapotranspiration Shifts Under a Drying Climate(Copernicus, 2022-03-28)Around 60 percent of terrestrial precipitation on the global average transforms into evapotranspiration. However, reliable estimation of actual evapotranspiration (AET) is challenging as it depends on multiple climatic and biophysical factors. Despite developments such as remotely sensed AET products, AET responses to prolonged drought is still poorly understood. Therefore, this study focuses on understanding long-term changes and variability of AET prior to and during the Millennium Drought in Victoria, Australia. We also investigate the capability of commonly used rainfall-runoff models to simulate AET under multiyear droughts. Therefore, we employ simple sensitivity analysis to examine four different water balance approaches between pre-drought and drought periods in six different study catchments in Victoria. The first water balance approach is the simplest long-term water balance approach, partitioning long-term precipitation into evapotranspiration and runoff. The second water balance approach adopts a long-term change in storage to the water balance during the Millennium Drought by employing regional-scale change in GRACE estimates derived from Fowler et al. (2020). The third and fourth water balances are based on simulations from SIMHYD and SACRAMENTO. Surprisingly, the adoption of long-term change in storage during the Millennium Drought indicates that the annual rates of pre-drought AET were largely maintained throughout the drought; i.e. the rate was relatively constant with time. This suggests that AET gets priority over streamflow following a drying shift in precipitation partitioning; resulting in a relatively constant AET under multiyear drought. In contrast, the rainfall-runoff models underestimated AET during the drought compared to both water balance approaches. These results broadly acknowledge the need for model improvements to provide more realistic AET estimates under future drying climates and provide a new perspective on recent hydrological phenomena such as changing rainfall-runoff relationships in these regions. Furthermore, this sensitivity analysis was augmented and confirmed by a regional-scale water balance approach.
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ItemExplaining changes in rainfall-runoff relationships during and after Australia's Millennium Drought: a community perspective( 2022-04-20)The Millennium Drought lasted more than a decade, and is notable for causing persistent shifts in the relationship between rainfall and runoff in many south-east Australian catchments. Research to date has successfully characterised where and when shifts occurred and explored relationships with potential drivers, but a convincing physical explanation for observed changes in catchment behaviour is still lacking. Originating from a large multi-disciplinary workshop, this paper presents a range of possible process explanations of flow response, and then evaluates these hypotheses against available evidence. The hypotheses consider climatic forcing, vegetation, soil moisture dynamics, groundwater, and anthropogenic influence. The hypotheses are assessed against evidence both temporally (eg. why was the Millennium Drought different to previous droughts?) and spatially (eg. why did rainfall-runoff relationships shift in some catchments but not in others?). The results point to the unprecedented length of the drought as the primary climatic driver, paired with interrelated groundwater processes, including: declines in groundwater storage, reduced recharge associated with vadose zone expansion, and reduced connection between subsurface and surface water processes. Other causes include increased evaporative demand and interception of runoff by small private dams. Finally, we discuss the need for long-term field monitoring, particularly targeting internal catchment processes and subsurface dynamics. We recommend continued investment in understanding of hydrological shifts, particularly given their relevance to water planning under climate variability and change.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntegrated framework for rapid climate stress testing on a monthly timestep(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2022-04-01)
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ItemJustin Costelloe: a champion of arid-zone water research(Springer Verlag, 2019-11-06)Justin Francis Costelloe (Fig. 1) was born in 1965. He grew up in the mining city of Bendigo (Victoria, Australia) before studying Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He went on to work as an exploration geologist in the mining industry in the dryland regions of Australia and Chile. He developed a love of Australia’s desert landscapes and returned to undertake Masters and PhD studies on arid zone hydrology at the University of Melbourne, before continuing as a research fellow and senior research fellow leading arid zone research projects. Justin was a leader in research aimed at understanding surface water and groundwater in Australia’s arid zone and also made important interdisciplinary contributions linking the hydrology and ecology of the arid zone, with a focus on Australia’s iconic Channel Country and the Great Artesian Basin (GAB).
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ItemPredicting shifts in rainfall-runoff partitioning during multiyear drought: Roles of dry period and catchment characteristics(AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION, 2016-12-01)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDecreases in relative humidity across Australia(IOP PUBLISHING LTD, 2021-07-01)Abstract How relative humidity is changing is important for our understanding of future changes in precipitation and evaporation. For example, decreases in relative humidity have the potential to increase evaporation and evapotranspiration increasing water scarcity. Since projected precipitation changes are highly uncertain, there is significant research relating precipitation changes to more certain local temperature increases, but such research often assumes relative humidity will remain constant. Here, we investigate how absolute and relative humidity across Australia have changed over 1955–2020. Absolute humidity, measured by dew point temperature, has remained relatively constant, while relative humidity has decreased on average over land by approximately −1%/decade. This suggests that assuming constant relative humidity when predicting future extreme precipitation using temperature or absolute humidity associations may result in over-estimation of future extreme precipitation intensities. As absolute humidity, measured by dew point temperature, was found to be relatively constant, we conclude the decrease in relative humidity is not due to a lack of water available for evaporation but may instead be the result of evaporation not increasing in line with temperature increases.
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ItemCAMELS-AUS: hydrometeorological time series and landscape attributes for 222 catchments in Australia(COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH, 2021-08-06)Abstract. This paper presents the Australian edition of the Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-sample Studies (CAMELS) series of datasets. CAMELS-AUS (Australia) comprises data for 222 unregulated catchments, combining hydrometeorological time series (streamflow and 18 climatic variables) with 134 attributes related to geology, soil, topography, land cover, anthropogenic influence and hydroclimatology. The CAMELS-AUS catchments have been monitored for decades (more than 85 % have streamflow records longer than 40 years) and are relatively free of large-scale changes, such as significant changes in land use. Rating curve uncertainty estimates are provided for most (75 %) of the catchments, and multiple atmospheric datasets are included, offering insights into forcing uncertainty. This dataset allows users globally to freely access catchment data drawn from Australia's unique hydroclimatology, particularly notable for its large interannual variability. Combined with arid catchment data from the CAMELS datasets for the USA and Chile, CAMELS-AUS constitutes an unprecedented resource for the study of arid-zone hydrology. CAMELS-AUS is freely downloadable from https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.921850 (Fowler et al., 2020a).
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ItemAWAPer: An R package for area weighted catchment daily meteorological data anywhere within Australia(John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020-02-28)Meteorological time‐series data are a fundamental input to hydrological investigations. But sourcing data is often laborious and plagued with difficulties. In an effort to improve efficiency and rigor we present an R‐package, named AWAPer (https://github.com/peterson-tim-j/AWAPer), for the efficient estimation of daily area weighted catchment average and spatial variance of meteorological variables, including evapotranspiration. The package allows creation and updating of a data‐cube of gridded daily data from 1900 onwards. Once created, point and area weighted estimates can be extracted at user‐defined locations and time periods for anywhere within Australia. Examples of point and catchment average extraction are presented.
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ItemEquifinality and Flux Mapping: A New Approach to Model Evaluation and Process Representation Under Uncertainty(AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION, 2019-11-12)
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ItemNo Preview Available