This product delivers a monthly timeseries of water surface area for On-Farm Storages (OFS) across the five key valleys of the northern Murray-Darling Basin (Border River, Gwydir, Namoi, Macquarie-Castlereagh, and Barwon-Darling). The dataset encompasses both licensed Flood Plain Harvesting (FPH) storages and other storages of interest within these regions.

OFS play a vital role in agricultural water supply by enabling farmers to store water for irrigation. Regular monitoring of these storages is essential for effective water resource management, supporting efforts to address water scarcity, ensure regulatory compliance, respond to climate variability, and promote sustainable agricultural practices.

The OFS Water Surface Area Monthly dataset enables the identification of storage fill and drawdown events over large areas, capturing responses to both natural and managed water movements. Timeseries observations are generated from publicly available Landsat (since 1987) and Sentinel (since 2015) satellite imagery, using multispectral data and a streamlined geospatial model [2]. The full methodology is available as open-source code published by the Department [1].

References

[1] https://datasets.seed.nsw.gov.au/dataset/remote-sensing-earth-observation-water-toolkit.

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01431160600589179 (Subscription required).

Note: If you would like to ask a question, make any suggestions, or tell us how you are using this dataset, please visit the NSW Water Hub which has an online forum you can join.