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Revision of the Australian Groundwater Modelling Guidelines

Sustainable groundwater management is supported by good groundwater modelling. It contributes to water resource and security planning, operational and ecological management, and impact assessments for infrastructure development.

The South Australian Department for Environment and Water (DEW) is leading a project to update the national groundwater modelling guidelines.

The scope of this project is to produce groundwater modelling guidelines to support groundwater model end-users. These guidelines are intended to be clear, practical and, as much as possible, avoid the use of jargon. They will address hydrogeological model conceptualisation and will support the development and review of groundwater models that are transparent, defendable, robust and repeatable.

This project will produce publicly available national groundwater modelling guidelines aimed at end-users that reflect the current and, where possible, future state of groundwater modelling. The guidelines will support non-modelling end-users to evaluate whether a model is transparent, defendable, robust and repeatable, as these are critical characteristics required by models used to support decision making.

The guidelines will refer as needed to existing documents for additional technical advice. Any further issues identified as part of this project that are not included in the final guidelines will be documented and appropriate recommendations for future work will be made.

The project is jointly funded by the Australian Government ($1.5 million) and the South Australian Government ($405,000). Australian Government funding is provided through the National Water Grid Fund.

This project will work with stakeholders from all states and territories to develop the revised guidelines.

The project is overseen by the National Water Grid (Science Program), National Groundwater Sub-Committee and the Groundwater Modelling Guidelines Revision Steering Committee.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Groundwater modelling guidelines describe best practice. Guidelines were developed for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission in 2001 (Middlemis et al.,2001) and for the National Water C omission in 2012 (Barnett et al.,2012). These have since been supplemented by Explanatory Notes from the Independent Expert Scientific Committee on Unconventional Gas and Large Coal Mining Development (IESC), and by materials developed for the Groundwater Management Decision Support Initiative (GMDSI0. Most of those resources were developed for groundwater modellers and much remains valid.

However there remains a gap in accessible guidance for decision-makers who are also not groundwater modellers: water managers and industry proponents who commission models, regulators who must review environmental impact assessments, and others who want to understand and use model results after the model has been published.

There has also been the emergence since 2012 of newer modelling techniques including new software and enhanced computing capabilities which need to be assessed for their validity and suitability for different situations and best practice use.

Consequently, there is a need for clear, practical guidelines to support end-users.