Barry Croke

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Verified

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• PhD Astrophysics, UNSW
• Professor at Australian National University

Risks to shared water resources in the Murray–Darling Basin are reviewed after the report by CSIRO on the same topic in 2006. CSIRO outlined six major risks to shared water resources in the Basin. Herein, six groups of researchers have reviewed the risks of climate change, forest growth, groundwater, water infrastructure, water quality, and governa...

Vegetation in semi-arid wetlands often serve as a critical habitat and refuge for a wide range of species. In many wetlands, on-ground monitoring of vegetation is either not comprehensive or unavailable, which impedes our understanding of the system. However, basic data on climate and hydrological variables, as well as remote sensing data, can ofte...

As hydrological systems are pushed outside the envelope of historical experience, the ability of current hydrological models to serve as a basis for credible prediction and decision making is increasingly challenged. Conceptual models are the most common type of surface water hydrological model used for decision support due to reasonable performanc...

Wildfires elicit a diversity of hydrological changes, impacting processes that drive both water quantity and quality. As wildfires increase in frequency and severity, there is a need to assess the implications for the hydrological response. Wildfire‐related hydrological changes operate at three distinct timescales: the immediate fire aftermath, the...

The planning, designing, management, and operation of water systems has been one of the most important activities throughout the history of humankind. However, as a scientific and applied discipline, it evolved about 70 years ago. The International Commission on Water Resources Systems (ICWRS) has primarily focused on developing and implementing im...

Mathematical modellers, decision support developers, statisticians, and students evaluate the differences between observed and model predicted values. When evaluating models, it is far too easy to conduct model evaluation by fitting a linear regression to the data. In this paper, steps are presented on ‘how to’ evaluate a model using deviance metri...

In global sensitivity analysis (GSA) of a model, a proper convergence analysis of metrics is essential for ensuring a level of confidence or trustworthiness in sensitivity results obtained, yet is somewhat deficient in practice. The level of confidence in sensitivity measures, particularly in relation to their influence and support for decisions fr...

Recreational waterbodies with high levels of faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) pose health risks and are an ongoing challenge for urban-lake managers. Lake Burley Griffin (LBG) in the Australian Capital city of Canberra is a popular site for water-based recreation, but analyses of seasonal and long-term patterns in enterococci that exceed alert level...

Factor Fixing (FF) is a common method for reducing the number of model parameters to lower computational cost. FF typically starts with distinguishing the insensitive parameters from the sensitive and pursues uncertainty quantification (UQ) on the resulting reduced‐order model, fixing each insensitive parameter at a fixed value. There is a need, ho...

Analyzing land use/ land cover change is a fundamental tool for evaluating the environmental consequences of human activities. This research was conducted to detect and predict the likely land use changes in the Gorgan‐rud River Basin, Iran, and to estimate the past and future population growth as a driving force in land use change and degradation....

Geographic simulation models can be used to explore and better understand the geographical environment. Recent advances in geographic and socio-environmental research have led to a dramatic increase in the number of models used for this purpose. Some model repositories provide opportunities for users to explore and apply models, but few provide a g...

Various problems are occurring and evolving in the earth’s environment, for example, global warming, air/water/soil pollution, floods, traffic congestion, and so forth. Moreover, decision-making and planning demands in industry and governance areas are also dependent on reasonable understandings of the environment. Geographic modelling (can also be...

Recreational use of natural freshwater bodies poses a risk to human health, although the risks associated with different types of exposure in freshwater are not clear. A systematic review was carried out to identify the risks of adverse health outcomes among individuals exposed through primary contact recreation compared to minimal contact recreati...

Small hydropower (SHP) possesses significant economic, technical, and environmental advantages, and accounts for a large proportion of hydropower development in China. However, the concentrated, cascaded, and diversion-type development of SHP has resulted in long-distance dewatering of river sections, and inter-basin water transfers have led to sev...

Active Subspaces is a recently developed concept that identifies essential directions of the response surface of a model, providing sensitivity metrics known as activity scores. We compare activity scoring with the Sobol' and the Morris global methods using a series of well-known benchmark test functions with exactly computable sensitivities. In th...

A computationally efficient and robust sampling scheme can support a sensitivity analysis of models to discover their behaviour through Quasi Monte Carlo approximation. This is especially useful for complex models, as often occur in environmental domains when model runtime can be prohibitive. The Sobol' sequence is one of the most used quasi-random...

Despite widespread use of factor fixing in environmental modeling, its effect on model predictions has received little attention and is instead commonly presumed to be negligible. We propose a proof-of-concept adaptive method for systematically investigating the impact of factor fixing. The method uses Global Sensitivity Analysis methods to identif...

This study aims to present a process for hydrological model exploration for selecting an appropriate model compatible with the modeling objectives. The process consists of three stages: (1) initial choice based on the modeling objectives; (2) model selection based on intercomparison among underlying conceptualizations of the models; and (3) final m...

A well-constructed drainage network is essential for hydrological modeling. Agricultural watersheds with heavy human alternations often contain man-made features like terraced fields and ponds. Incorporating these features in the drainage network in these watersheds is extremely important for hydrological modeling. This study proposed a novel hybri...

This paper introduces an alternative way of randomizing Sobol0 sequences, called the Column Shift method, for reconstructing replicates to improve estimation of the uncertainty in sensitivity indices. The Column Shift method provides reliable results when applied to variance-based sensitivity analysis of the V function, with much higher accuracy th...

Recent literature on model evaluation has highlighted the need, particularly in an interdisciplinary problem and team setting, to go beyond the evaluation of results and outputs of a problem-solving pathway (process), and monitor and evaluate the pathway itself to improve ongoing activities undertaken by the research team that best achieve the desi...

Diagnostic testing is an oft-recommended use of sensitivity analysis to assess correctness or plausibility of model behavior. In this paper we demonstrate the use of sensitivity analysis as a complementary first-pass software test for the validation of model behavior. Typical testing processes rely on comparing model outputs to results known to be...

In this synthesis, we assess present research and anticipate future development needs in modeling water quality in watersheds. We first discuss areas of potential improvement in the representation of freshwater systems pertaining to water quality, including representation of environmental interfaces, in-stream water quality and process interactions...

Sensitivity analysis (SA) has been used to evaluate the behavior and quality of environmental models by estimating the contributions of potential uncertainty sources to quantities of interest (QoI) in the model output. Although there is an increasing literature on applying SA in environmental modeling, a pragmatic and specific framework for spatial...

Groundwater is experiencing a higher risk of aquifer depletion due to longer drought duration and increasing water demand induced by climate change. The climate impacts on groundwater can be propagated to changes in groundwater discharge to rivers, which will deeply alter the connection between groundwater and surface water and reshape the fundamen...

This paper presents a component-based integrated environmental model developed through participatory processes to explore sustainable water management options. Possible futures with improved farm profitability and ecological outcomes relative to modelled baselines were identified through exploratory modelling. The integrated model and the results p...

Diffuse recharge is vital in determining the availability of renewable groundwater. Estimating diffuse recharge, however, is a great challenge plagued with uncertainty due to limitations in direct observation and process understanding. Hydrological model is functional for diffuse recharge estimation at catchment scale. It can be used independently...

Probabilistic models for sub-daily rainfall predictions are important tools for understanding catchment hydrology and estimating essential rainfall inputs for agricultural and ecological studies. This research aimed at achieving theoretical probability distribution to non-zero, sub-daily rainfall using data from 1467 rain gauges across the Australi...

Presentation given at MODSIM 2019, (Canberra, Dec 2 - 6) on the value of conceptual testing processes to provide quick and early indication of possible issues during model development.

The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jingjinji) region is the most densely populated region in China and suffers from severe water resource shortage, with considerable water-related issues emerging under a changing context such as construction of water diversion projects (WDP), regional synergistic development, and climate change. To this end, this paper dev...

Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis (UA/SA) aid in assessing whether model complexity is warranted and under what conditions. To support these analyses a variety of software tools have been developed to provide UA/SA methods and approaches in a more accessible manner. This paper applies a hybrid bibliometric approach using 11 625 publications sour...

The physical and biochemical processes that underpin the generation and transport of water quality constituents are extremely complex, as are the social and institutional processes that determine how human activities impact the landscape. Any models attempting to represent these processes will therefore be fraught with huge overall uncertainty. It...

Identifiability is a fundamental concept in parameter estimation, and therefore key to the large majority of environmental modeling applications. Parameter identifiability analysis assesses whether it is theoretically possible to estimate unique parameter values from data, given the quantities measured, conditions present in the forcing data, model...

This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through on-line media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, p...

Probabilistic models are useful tools in understanding rainfall characteristics, generating synthetic data and predicting future events. This study describes the results from an analysis on comparing the probabilistic nature of daily, monthly and seasonal rainfall totals using data from 1327 rainfall stations across Australia. The main objective of...

The simple conceptual flood inundation model TVD (Teng-Vaze-Dutta) is more computationally efficient and cost-effective than traditional hydrodynamic models. It is especially useful for applications that do not require velocity output and have low demands on flood dynamic representation. In this study, we have addressed the main inherent limitation...

Catchment-scale water quality models have become important tools for water quality management, planning and reporting worldwide. In this review, we synthesise recent developments in water quality modelling, focusing on catchment-scale models of freshwater, non-urban systems and their ability to support catchment management. We explore 10 key attrib...

The presentation shows: 1) our plan for developing hybrid water quality models, inspired by USGS's SPARROW framework, but want to make it more temporally dynamic. 2) progress in sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of water quality models.

Hydrologic models are essential tools for understanding hydrologic processes, such as precipitation, which is a fundamental component of the water cycle. For an improved understanding and the evaluation of different precipitation datasets, especially their applicability for hydrologic modelling, three kinds of precipitation products, CMADS, TMPA-3B...

General software development best practices that are compatible with, and beneficial to, the model development process. Presented at iEMSs 2018 (Fort Collins, Colorado)

Management of water resources requires understanding of the hydrology and hydrogeology, as well as the policy and human drivers and their impacts. This understanding requires relevant inputs from a wide range of disciplines, which will vary depending on the specific case study. One approach to gain understanding of the impact of climate and society...

Integrated models are often made up of smaller component models, each representing a particular domain that are coupled together. Such models are software for a scientific purpose, and so similarities between model and software development exist. These models tend to be developed by researchers who take on a dual-role of scientist and software deve...

This paper presents an overview of work in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and SW Bangladesh through a series of projects from 2005 to the present, considering the impact of farming systems, water shed development and/or agricultural intensification on livelihoods in selected rural areas of India and Bangladesh. The projects spanned a range of scales s...

The Paddock to Reef Integrated Monitoring, Modelling and Reporting Program (P2R program) measures progress towards Reef Plan's goals and targets. Water quality modelling in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) P2R program is implemented through the Dynamic SedNet Plugin (Ellis and Searle, 2014) developed within the eWater Source modelling framework, and ha...

Water quality models are replete with implicit assumptions. Some of the assumptions may be legacy in nature, having originated from early development of a model and subsequently taken for granted within the scientific community. For instance, Easton et al. (2008) reported that the SWAT model implicitly assumes an infiltration-excess response to rai...

Inspired by Tarantola et al. (2012), we extend their analysis to include the Latin hypercube and Random sampling methods. In their paper, they compared Sobol’ quasi-Monte Carlo and Latin supercube sampling methods by using a V-function and variance-based sensitivity analysis. In our case we compare the convergence rate and average error between Sob...

The FOCAP multi-object system on the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) has been used to observe 35 faint stars (V > 18, M v > + 4.6) and 83 stars with V < 18 in 47 Tuc. The large sample of stars well below the turnoff permits us to examine abundance variations in relatively unevolved stars for the first time. Our spectral resolution (2.7Å) is greate...

We review several papers that have afforded insights into determinants of positive outcomes (e.g. the adoption of tools, improved learning and/or collaboration) from modelling projects. From a subsequent internet search in the environmental domain we identified 33 such factors that are then invoked in a transferable survey-based method to facilitat...

This paper reviews state-of-the-art empirical, hydrodynamic and simple conceptual models for determining flood inundation. It explores their advantages and limitations, highlights the most recent advances and discusses future directions. It addresses how uncertainty is analysed in this field with the various approaches and identifies opportunities...

We explore how to address the challenges of adaptation of water resources systems under changing conditions by supporting flexible, resilient and low-regret solutions, coupled with on-going monitoring and evaluation. This will require improved understanding of the linkages between biophysical and social aspects in order to better anticipate the pos...

An intensive fieldwork campaign in the Purulia District of West Bengal (where average annual rainfall is 1300 mm) resulted in the development of a model designed to represent the hydrological impact of watershed development (WSD) on a 2 km2 catchment. Observations include a high temporal resolution (minutely) climate dataset (rainfall, temperature,...

Shallow groundwater aquifers regularly support drought refuges for water‐dependent ecosystems. However, many aquifers are impacted by over‐extraction and pollution, potentially degrading their ability to support groundwater‐fed drought refuges. We investigated the response of groundwater‐connected riverine forests to a drought considered equivalent...

The spatially and temporally variable parameters and inputs to complex groundwater models typically result in long runtimes which hinder comprehensive calibration, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. Surrogate modeling aims to provide a simpler, and hence faster, model which emulates the specified output of a more complex model in function of its...

This paper explores the variation in hydrological response (often termed as non-stationarity, though this is not necessarily the correct use in the statistical meaning of this term) through time for the Bani catchment in Africa (mostly located in Mali). The objective is to identify deficiencies in the ability of the model to capture the variation i...

Rainfed transplanted rice (Oryza sativa) is the staple crop of the East India Plateau (EIP), where it is low yielding and drought-prone despite high annual rainfall (>1200 mm). Although grown traditionally on lowlands associated with drainage lines, population pressure has forced rice onto terraced slopes (medium-uplands) that now comprise >80% of...

Checking for model identifiability has several advantages as outlined in the paper. We illustrate the use of several screening methods for assessing structural identifiability that should serve as a valuable precursor to model redesign and more sophisticated uncertainty analyses. These are: global evolutionary optimisation algorithms (EAs) that are...

The issue of scale is examined in the context of a watershed development policy (WSD) in India. WSD policy goals, by improving the natural resource base, aim to improve the livelihoods of rural communities through increased sustainable production. It has generally been practiced at a micro-level of less than 500 ha, as this was seen to be a scale t...

We examine trends in the water resources of Cyprus by focussing on water flux changes in the important Kouris catchment. Our modelling approach is general and is a synthesis of an adapted conceptual daily rainfall-runoff model, radiation transfer models that use high resolution MODIS satellite climatological data and GCM scenarios for future climat...

Rainfall is a highly variable component of the climate system. There are substantial spatial and temporal variations in the frequency and spatial distribution of rainfall events. Little attention has been paid to the slow but ongoing variations of the spatial patterns of daily rainfall, especially over broad spatial scales. A better understanding o...

This paper discusses the integration of hydrology with other disciplines using an integrated assessment (IA) approach to the management and allocation of water resources. Recent developments in the field of socio-hydrology aim to develop stronger relationships between hydrology and the human dimensions of water resource management (WRM). This shoul...

Simple modelling approaches such as a spatially lumped, rainfall-runoff model offer a number of advantages in the management of water resources including the relative ease with which groundwater and surface water accounts can be evaluated at the river-reach scale in data-poor areas. However, rainfall-runoff models are generally not well suited for...

The management of freshwater ecosystems is usually targeted through the regulation of water quantity (limiting diversions and providing environmental flows) and regulation of water quality (setting limits or targets for constituent concentrations). Climate change is likely to affect water quantity and quality in multiple ways and the future managem...

The management of surface and groundwater can be regarded as presenting resource dilemmas. These are situations where multiple users share a common resource pool, and make contested claims about their rights to access the resource, and the best use and distribution of the resource among competing needs. Overshadowed by uncertainties caused by limit...

Sensitivity analysis (SA) is generally recognized as a worthwhile step to diagnose and remedy difficulties in identifying model parameters, and indeed in discriminating between model structures. An analysis of papers in three journals indicates that SA is a standard omission in hydrological modeling exercises. We provide some answers to ten reasona...

Recently, the inshore reefs of the Great Barrier Reef have declined rapidly because of deteriorating water quality. Increased catchment runoff is one potential culprit. The impacts of land-use on coral growth and reef health however are largely circumstantial due to limited long-term data on water quality and reef health. Here we use a 60 year cora...

The effects of data time-step on the accuracy of calibrated parameters in a discrete-time conceptual rainfall–streamflow model are reviewed and further investigated. A quick-flow decay time constant of 19.9 hr, calibrated for the 10.6 km2 Wye at Cefn Brwyn using daily data, massively overestimates a reference value of 3.76 hr calibrated using hourl...

Predicting water runoff in ungauged water catchment areas is vital to practical applications such as the design of drainage infrastructure and flooding defences, runoff forecasting, and for catchment management tasks such as water allocation and climate impact analysis. This full colour book offers an impressive synthesis of decades of internationa...

Conjunctive use of surface and groundwater through managed aquifer recharge (MAR) is underway in Australia, principally to reuse urban wastewater. The opportunity for MAR in farming landscapes has received less attention, and the extent this might occur using water from large flood events or dam releases has not been examined. This paper addresses...

Power laws are used to describe a large variety of natural and industrial phenomena. Consequently, they are used in a wide range of scientific research and management applications. This paper focuses on the identification of bounds on the parameter and prediction uncertainty in a power-law relation from experimental data, assuming known bounds on t...

This article examines the role that catchment hydrology plays in modern society: from understanding the behavior of catchments, to providing information for the management of water resources. This is discussed in the context of three classes of hydrological models (empirical, conceptual, and physics-based), and considers the problems faced by hydro...

Groundwater overdraft in many aquifers in Australia provides the motivation for exploring more reliable water supply options. Demand management to date has not reversed the pattern of falling groundwater levels in many highly developed irrigation districts of Australia. The potential of MAR in Australia has not been fully realised and assessed in r...

In the past, water resources in Australia have been over-allocated and this has led to the implementation of water reforms. An integrated assessment project is underway in the Namoi Catchment, located in New South Wales, Australia, that aims to assess the social, economic and ecological impacts of reductions in water allocations under current and f...

In order to use environmental models effectively for management and decision-making, it is vital to establish an appropriate level of confidence in their performance. This paper reviews techniques available across various fields for characterising the performance of environmental models with focus on numerical, graphical and qualitative methods. Ge...

In this paper, sensitivity analysis (SA) has been used to assess model sensitivities to input parameter values in a water quality model. The water quality model incorporates a rainfall-runoff sub-model and a sediment load estimation sub-model, and is calibrated against hydrologic and water quality data from the Moruya River catchment in southeast A...

Bayesian inference is used to study the effect of precipitation and model structural uncertainty on estimates of model parameters and confidence limits of predictive variables in a conceptual rainfall-runoff model in the snow-fed Rudbäck catchment (142 ha) in southern Finland. The IHACRES model is coupled with a simple degree day model to account f...

39th International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) congress 2012, Niagara Falls, Canada This conference presentation considers the optimisation of environmental flow rules in relation to the exploitation and resulting decline of surface and ground water, and reduction in the extent and health of ecological systems. Deriving optimal env...

This paper discusses an integrated approach for water resource management to improve rural livelihoods in the East India Plateau. This has involved linking hydrological, agronomic and social aspects to increase access to water, improve water use efficiency and develop capacity within the villages for better decision making regarding use of the avai...

Watershed Development (WSD) programs in rainfed dryland agriculture in India have been introduced in an effort to promote more sustainable management of the surface and groundwater resources, and to improve the livelihoods of farmers. This paper outlines the planned research for a project exploring the impacts of WSD at the meso-scale (~100 km2). T...

Water management is a topic of great importance in Australia. Future and current professionals specifically need quantitative skills in Hydrology due to the increase in available data (remote sensing and dataloggers). In addition, numerical models have become the main tool for prediction and forecasting in operational hydrology. Hydrology is taught...

Throughout the last decades uncertainty analysis has become an essential part of environmental model building (e.g. Beck 1987; Refsgaard et al., 2007). The objective of the paper is to introduce stochastic and setmembership uncertainty modelling concepts, which basically differ in the assumptions that are made with respect to the uncertainty charac...