Moving water at Sydney Uni

X-mas and the new year are almost upon us, so I thought I write a more philosophical blog this time intermingled with some lighter stuff. After that you probably won’t hear from me until in 2009, as I need a little break to refresh my brains. A key thing I am constantly struggling with is to understand the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Total freedom means total responsibility, but what does that mean if we are dealing with water resources? I need to give a talk for prospective students on the Infoday on 6 January and I thought I would explore this topic in that talk.
But first: I am recruiting! I am looking for a bright student wanting to take on a PhD in scaling problems in Hydrology. Anyone interested?

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday caught my eye because it was quite misleading in its content. It seemed to suggest that the water from the recent flooding in Tamworth was supposed to have reached the Darling river, if there was no pumping from agriculture. Anyway that is the tone that is set in the opening paragraph of the article. Only in the last 4 paragraphs does it get to the bottom of the issue, that most of the water would vanish naturally. I hate this type of reporting, although I can understand why the newspaper does it that way: it sells. But as my goal is to educate people about the Australian environment, this type of article makes me weep.

Well, it has been shown again that Australia really is the land of droughts and flooding rains. I have a short posting today. My PhD student, Dawit, sent me some pictures from his research site (a DWE monitoring site) in the Cockburn river near Tamworth. As you might have heard on the news, the area has had a lot of rain (150 mm+) in the last couple of days