Moving water at Sydney Uni

Last week, Floris and I wrote a commentary in the newspaper, building on some of the research Floris is doing and related to the to Cubbie or not to Cubbie question. Anyway, you can read it here. But, while writing this article, I was reminded of another question that I have not yet solved: whether Australia is better off growing annual cops under irrigation or perennial crops. I will explain.

Or between a small and shallow or a large and deep storage?

The main problem of large scale irrigation in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin is the uncertainty of the supply of water and thus the need to store water in large ring tanks (up to several 100 ha in surface area) to manage the water. Such large basins, if they are also shallow can evaporate extensively and this a key problem the irrigation community struggles with. Using engineering we could make them deeper, but as a result we would loose more water in deep drainage. So no luck there…