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Billions of litres of water vanishes from Australia's most vital river network

19 points by adrian_mrd 6y ago

steelbrain 6y ago
The link seems incorrect. I think you meant to link it to https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-03/the-mystery-of-the-murray-darlings-vanishing-flows/12612166 https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-03/the-mystery-of-the... instead of https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm
pvaldes 6y ago
Excellent presentation and interesting problem, but is not exactly a mystery to figure out what happened... Severe Bushfires season in 2019. "Where is our water?" in 2020 Your water is in the ocean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...
manicdee 6y ago
There's no mystery. The water is being stolen, or the water never existed anyway. Water allocations are based on a single year which had high rainfall. Models attempting to predict rainfall are problematic, and models attempting to predict available water following measured rainfall are confounded by over-extraction (ie: water theft). Water theft is being made increasingly easier by reducing the funding available for policing the regulations. If you want a summary of the political situation around water rights in Australia just search for "Angus Taylor water rights" or "Barnaby Joyce water rights". Our government is openly corrupt and they make no attempt to conceal it.
anitil 6y ago
There's a lot of smart people on HN, so it's worth asking. Would it be possible to detect water theft from satellite imagery? I don't know enough about any of this, but besides the obvious difficulty (trying to measure a 3D object with 2D imagery), water flow in Australia is inconsistent at best. I don't even know what kind of historical data we have available. Anyone interested? My email is in my bio
- ruffrey 6y ago
  Former head of tech at water data startup In California here. Imo the data on water rights is way too messy and complicated to do this. Also there are things like private canals, utility owned canals, in addition to govt aqueducts. Utilities release water for lots of reasons. It is as much a data quality and secrecy problem as a computer vision or sensor problem. Things in Australia are a lot more centralized. It seems like Australia would be one of the best places to try.

19 points by adrian_mrd 6y ago

The link seems incorrect. I think you meant to link it to https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-03/the-mystery-of-the-murray-darlings-vanishing-flows/12612166 https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-03/the-mystery-of-the... instead of https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm

pvaldes 6y ago

Excellent presentation and interesting problem, but is not exactly a mystery to figure out what happened... Severe Bushfires season in 2019. "Where is our water?" in 2020 Your water is in the ocean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...

manicdee 6y ago

There's no mystery. The water is being stolen, or the water never existed anyway. Water allocations are based on a single year which had high rainfall. Models attempting to predict rainfall are problematic, and models attempting to predict available water following measured rainfall are confounded by over-extraction (ie: water theft). Water theft is being made increasingly easier by reducing the funding available for policing the regulations. If you want a summary of the political situation around water rights in Australia just search for "Angus Taylor water rights" or "Barnaby Joyce water rights". Our government is openly corrupt and they make no attempt to conceal it.

anitil 6y ago

There's a lot of smart people on HN, so it's worth asking. Would it be possible to detect water theft from satellite imagery? I don't know enough about any of this, but besides the obvious difficulty (trying to measure a 3D object with 2D imagery), water flow in Australia is inconsistent at best. I don't even know what kind of historical data we have available. Anyone interested? My email is in my bio

ruffrey 6y ago
Former head of tech at water data startup In California here. Imo the data on water rights is way too messy and complicated to do this. Also there are things like private canals, utility owned canals, in addition to govt aqueducts. Utilities release water for lots of reasons. It is as much a data quality and secrecy problem as a computer vision or sensor problem. Things in Australia are a lot more centralized. It seems like Australia would be one of the best places to try.