NSW
Office of Water
Water
Wise Ones Interviews
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Office of Water | |
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Chris RibbonsManager,
Water Resource Interview Date: 7 Oct, 2011 Interviewed by: Stephanie Lang Transcribed by: Glenys Murray
Chris, could you please give us an overview of your career? My career in Water started about 1970 when I was interviewed as a cadet engineer in this organisation one of our previous organisations. I was one of twelve people employed in 1970 as cadet engineers. I went to university for six years part time. So I was working as a trainee engineer while I was going to university. In 1976 I started off as an investigations engineer looking at major projects around NSW. I transitioned into hydrology and water resource engineers about seven years later. I started to develop computer programming skills, water management skills. Then in fact left the department in the early 1990’s, went to a laboratory doing hydraulic work. Coastal engineering, estuary engineering and flood engineering, after about seven years I came back to the department into modeling and water resource management. I moved into senior management about five or six years after that and have since managed the department’s surface water and groundwater management modeling teams. Chris, you mention that you have spent part of your career as a water modeler and managing other water modelers. Can you just give us a snapshot of what water modeling actually is? The water modeling that I do and there are various types of water modeling. The water modeling I do revolves around building computer models that simulate the main processes that go on in rivers. From rain to runoff to river flow to people taking and using that water for irrigation or environmental purposes. You have ground water modeling which models the process of rainfall recharge into ground water systems. Water moving through the aquifers, recharging of aquifers, water moving from rivers into aquifers and of course people extracting water from those aquifers. So it’s a computer model that simulates those processes and allows people to play, test those models and to answer questions about what happens if we change our water management policy. What might be the impacts on the system environment or the water uses?
From a science perspective what are the most important things to understand about groundwater and how do these things drive your approach to modeling? From ground water perspective the fundamental thing that I think we need to get right is the ground water, water balance. If we can understand where the water is coming from, where it is going and be able to account for that water as best we can. That allows us to understand the processes and that’s the main thing that drives our modeling. To represent that water balance and to represent how changes in water level will occur over time as different extraction rates, or different floods or different rainfall occurs in that catchment. How can surface and ground water be managed together? What are the new issues that have created challenges for water management and water modeling? To date we’ve generally modeling the surface water groundwater interchange individually in separate models. There’s been increasing demand from a number of water managers for us to bring this together into one model. We haven’t got there yet we’re still working on it. We’re trying to understand the process, we’re trying to quantify the process and we’re trying to represent it in a known way. At the moment a lot of surface water groundwater interchange is in an unknown bucket that we’re unable to quantify. We’re still not there yet. There are a number of programmes underway to try and gather information in the field to quantify what the exchange is. In surface water models the groundwater is lumped into a big bucket of unknowns. In the groundwater models the surface water groundwater exchange is better understood and defined within the modeling process. The big problem is that the order of magnitude of numbers in groundwater models the surface water groundwater exchange is so small compared to the unknown bucket in the surface water model. So the challenge is to bring those together. There’s a lot of direction, a lot of will in trying to quantify this to make sure we’re not double counting it. To make sure it’s properly accounted for and properly represented in both models. That’s the big challenge I think at the moment is just to make sure it’s properly represented and to move towards one modeling platform that will properly account for both surface water and groundwater exchange.
Do you think that it is likely that, that platform will ever be achieved? There are some prototypes around at the moment in the surface water modeling area that are starting to account for the surface water groundwater exchange. These are being developed within the eWater environment at the moment. The results are looking very promising. So I think from a surface water process we’re like to be able to represent the surface water groundwater exchange in a reasonable way and robust enough that it will stand up to scrutiny. Can you tell us a little about the eWater environment? EWater is a name for a cooperative research group of people. Bringing together both government and private organisations and academia through places like CSIRO. One of the aims of eWater at the moment is to build robust computer models for the next generation of surface water and groundwater modeling. That allows them to talk to each other a lot easier, allow a robust and a consistent set of models across the Murray-Darling Basin. In fact there are national objectives in regard to coming up a national modeling strategy so that it is consistent. It’s more about a research area at the moment, building modeling products for industry and government for the next generation. If people want to know what’s happening in the eWater environment how would they find out? The easiest way is to go to the web. Look up eWater, search for eWater they have their own web site. Its self explanatory, it will provide an outline of the modeling tools they have available and in fact how you can access them. As a manager what are the key issues that you make decisions about? What factors do you consider when making these decisions? My role as the manager of the modeling team requires me to ensure that the team is working effectively together to develop and build surface water groundwater models. I provide some guidance to them. I provide some direction but I like to allow them to explore areas. Use their brain; use their initiative to develop these models. I’m just there to provide direction, advice and probably some history with areas that we have tried before and failed. But not try to stifle their initiatives in this area. The other area of course is managing people. I’ve got about twenty four people to manage. There are all the Human Resources issues with regard to managing people. From “I want to go on leave, I want to have six months off”, to team building, to training. So they’re all issues that have to be dealt with as a manager. In dealing with that I’m a fairly laid back sort of manager. I encourage people to work things out themselves. I don’t want to force them to go in particular directions. I try to allow their input into the process. But at some point I get paid to make the decision. So if it gets to that point I make the decision, take that responsibility and move on. It’s a matter of being part of the team but also leading the team, finding that balance.
What have been the significant policy issues and changes you have seen over your career? How have these impacted on the work you do? It’s interesting when I first started as a hydrological modeler we were all about building dams. Where can we build a new dam? How much water can we supply? How much entitlement can we give out to water users? This was driven by the community’s wants for economic outcomes. Food, we need to grow crops. We’ve moved now to more of an environmental focus. What environmental flow rules should we have in place? How much of the water should we be protecting? Of course we have to deal with both sides of that argument. So how much water should we protect for the environment but how much water should we give to the water users? So that’s been one of the biggest drivers. Moving into the environmental area has also required us to model water behaviour on a much finer scale. So everyone wants to know on a daily basis what’s the behaviour of the system on days or how many days can I get water? How many days of surplus flow was there that went into this wetland? So the main change has been along that line. Supporting that has been water sharing plants. So water sharing plants have been a big step forward in water management in recent times. We’re now going through an even bigger step change I think in water management with the basin plan, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan coming into place. NSW has signed up to the Murray-Darling Basin planning process and we’ll have to implement the outcomes from the Murray-Darling Basin process in the next round of water sharing plans. I think they’ve been major changes. The other biggest change in the last few years has been the Commonwealth Government’s involvement in water management. They’ve come to the table with significant amounts of money, with a range of objectives to use that money for. Not necessarily having a long experience of water management so they’re in a very steep learning process. The challenges have been working with and educating the Commonwealth Government about water management. Some of their ideas are good in theory but in practice they’re not realistic. Can you tell us a bit more about the water sharing plan process and what’s involved in water sharing plans? In the late 1990’s there was a very strong push for environmental flow rules. This was before water sharing plans in fact came into being. It was about the same time that the new Water Management Act was being developed. It was a process to introduce environmental flow rules, to provide some certainty for entitlements that water users have and to provide that balance between environmental outcomes and reliability and security for water users. So in the late 90’s a range of environmental flow rules were developed and tested in the models. It went through community consultation processes and had reached agreement balancing between the water uses, the environmental lobby groups. Then we transitioned into water sharing plans which was a formalisation of those environmental flow rules. So we had the Water Management Act and all these requirements to develop water sharing plans. We’d already developed some environmental flow rules so we transitioned into a process with community consultation, developing these environmental flow rules to establish the water coming back to the environment but also trying to give irrigators security. Water sharing plans are in place for ten years. These were the plans we’re putting in place to share the water out amongst all the water users. They have a life of ten years and people have some security about what’s been proposed. The water sharing plans are an adaptive process so we will continue to monitor, understand and develop understanding of the water sharing process. We will adapt our water management to go through it. Models are the tools that provide the information to policy makers to try and put in place the best policies to find a solution that everyone is happy with or not too many people are unhappy with.
How do the water sharing plans interact with the Murray- Darling Basin Plan? Under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan itself states will need to develop what are now going to be called water resource plans that are compliant and take account of the Murray-Darling Basin planning process. Our NSW water sharing plans will transition into water resource plans under the Murray-Darling Basin. As we’re becoming aware of there’s a process within that of developing environmental flow rules, addressing environmental flow objectives basin wide. We have the Commonwealth Environmental Water holder now in the market buying significant amounts of entitlements that water users previously owned and directing that water at environmental targets. Those targets of course vary from targets in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia all the way to the Murray mouth. So it’s a much broader perspective on managing water now, rather than maybe a parochial state by state basis. You mentioned earlier the Commonwealth is a newer player in water management and you’ve mentioned there that they’ve been buying water. What other ways have they impacted on the way water is managed in NSW? They’re still developing their ideas of how to use that water at the moment. How to fit within the state structure of moving water around, sharing water, that’s all happening at the moment. The other area is they’ve got a very large bucket of money that they’re allocating to the states through sustaining the basin programme. Where they’re looking at major projects that will save water and again three of those fit within our area of water management. They are looking at piping stock and domestic replacement schemes. A lot of water is pushed down the rivers for stock and domestic aims but often we have to push a lot more water down than just the small amount of water that water users want. Sometimes that water gets lost through evaporation or seepage. When I say lost that water goes somewhere and it does have environmental benefits. So we have to keep that in the back of our mind. There’s a metering project underway, looking at, with Commonwealth funding, rolling out new metres across the state for all groundwater unregulated and regulated water users. This is obviously going to have lots of benefits for water managers. We will have more information we’ll know where the water is going. We’ll be able to account for the water a lot better we’ll be able to plan its distribution a lot better. The other area that they’re also looking at funding is in flood plain management. A lot of water users in NSW utilise flood water. That’s water that’s flowing across the flood plain it may have been overtopping riverbanks when the rivers flood. Also of course when it rains a lot water runs down hill and if it’s going to run across your property you might want to catch it and use it. We don’t have a lot of information about quantifying this process. We’ve talked to water users over the years. We know they do it, we understand how they do it but at this stage we’re unable to quantify it. In the future we’d like to be able quantify that and give people entitlements or rights to that water. So we can better manage that water. So they’re three areas that significant amounts of Commonwealth money are coming forward at the moment. Any projects that have the potential to save water the Commonwealth Government is looking to fund those sorts of projects. Modeling and models are the tools that quantify that saving and models also are the tools for us to understand what third party impact there might be from that process as well.
You’ve mentioned that at the beginning of your career your work was around building dams and catching water and distributing water to water users and over time we’ve have moved to being very concerned about the environment and making sure water flows to support the environment. That is a significant shift in policy and approach. I’m interested in how that change played out in your career. What differences you noticed? What was discussed with your colleagues? How you felt about those changes? I think a number of the changes I’ve gone through in terms of water management modeling parallel the way society’s gone through those changes. From a modeler from a hydrologist from a technician’s viewpoint our aim is always to provide the best and most reliable information we can for people to make those decisions. At the time decisions were about building dams. People wanted to conserve water in dams and reuse it to meet their needs. That’s consistent with a society that wants to use that water for production for the wealth of the community growth of regional towns. The whole range of those issues probably the time… and again we were in the good times and there was a lot of water around. We always thought the water won’t run out. We hadn’t experienced too many droughts. We’d been through the late 1950’s. The 50’s were very, very wet, the 60’s were wet there was always water around. Everybody wanted to catch this water build dams and use it. As we moved forward we realised that water is a scarce resource. Hydrologists and modelers have always been saying that but people said “we want to build dams, we want to build dams”. The environmental lobby group started to become stronger even in the department. The environmental group was one or two people when I first started and now it’s probably a third of the department. Society I think has started to look at sustainability issues. Can we sustain this level of development and again modeling and hydrology and hydrogeology provide that information to make people aware that water isn’t a resource that’s always there. I think we will go through droughts we will have floods. We’ve just been through a nine or ten year drought and so it’s very much in every bodies mind at the moment. How many wetlands or iconic forests or we used to call them swamps. How many wet areas have suffered? Again I think the environment is fairly robust and part of the wetting and drying cycle is part of the Australian environment. So I think I’ve probably grown and changed as much as society has in that side of things. What are the key social and economic issues you need to recognise in the modeling of water systems? When people ask me this question I usually come back wit h a question about what are the key drivers for socio and economic issues in society. Water is a key indicator and I ask economists “well what water based activities do you want information on”? If an economist says to me “I need to understand how annual crops might vary with different water availability”. Then I say “we can model the water, we can model the crops, and we can give you annual information of crops” Then the economist or the social scientist can take that information and translate that into social and economic impacts. So we’re not part of the socio economic process or understanding the socio economic impacts of water management.
But we can provide key indicators of water availability and we try to translate that into cropping behaviour which can be inferred in terms of wealth of individuals, wealth of regions and that can be translated into the social behaviors around rural communities. A number of mostly academic institutions have grappled with the idea over the years of trying to translate our water models into socio and economic models. I don’t think we’ve got there yet but we’re continuing to work in that area. I think it will continue to grow. In trying to translate hydrology, hydrogeology, surface water, groundwater models and outputs from those models will give you indicators to understand how changes in water policy impact on individuals and the community. What are the key environmental issues that impact on your work and your products? The big questions are around the use of surface water and groundwater for environmental outcomes. Whether that be a surface water wetland; how much water should we put in there? When should we put it in there? How long should it be in there? There are groundwater dependant ecosystems that rely on groundwater. How long are they wet for? How long are they dry for? How much water do they take? How much water do they evaporate out of the system? Most of our modeling in based around understanding the availability of water for those systems and how long they will get water, how much water they will get. How long won’t they get water? What are the major drivers for those processes? It’s all about identifying a key environmental asset which is the buzz word these days and understanding and working with the environmental scientists who say “this particular wetland should be wet once every ten years”. Does that happen, does that not happen, it needs to be inundated for at least ten weeks for bird breeding does that happen, does it not happen. Our challenge is to equate what our models represent as flow in the rivers to how that would equate to inundation of water in a wetland for a certain duration for a certain depth, for a certain time, for certain environmental outcomes. I think that’s the basic driver for our environmental model.
Wetland is an example of a surface water asset. Are there any other examples of surface water assets and what about the groundwater assets? Surface water assets vary from a wetland to even just the floodplain to the within bank riverine system. As the river dries out the local environment, the animals and the plants will die off if they don’t get water. Issues like having small amounts of flow in a river system as the systems dry out you get ponds created. How much water do you need to keep those ponds going for all the little animals or the little macrophytes, I don’t know all the ecological terms, for all the things that rely on that last little bit of water. So there are ecological environmental issues from within river to the billabongs that we all hear about and are included in songs. To the flood plains, to the major environmental assets of the Gwydir wetlands and the Macquarie marshes and the red gum forests of the Murray. You have to include the waterways; Menindee Lakes has environmental assets. The lower lakes of the Murray have environmental assets. Most issues have environmental features and you need to understand what they are and how water impacts on those environmental features.
What are the emerging policy issues in water management? From your experience what needs to be considered in these new policies? There are a range of emerging issues at the moment you can always talk about coal seam gas, surface water groundwater interaction. We’ve got a Namoi Valley water study happening at the moment. Everybody is waiting to see what the results are for the total water resources of the valley. We have water shepherding issues at the moment, can somebody own an entitlement to water at one place and move it to somewhere else. We’ve got Menindee Lakes issues at the moment. Menindee Lakes a very large body of water sitting out in western NSW a very large surface area a lot of it goes up in evaporation. Should we have Menindee Lakes? A lot of these questions are coming forward at the moment. Again another issue is we’ve been through a nine or ten year drought. What usually happens with a major drought it gets broken by a major flood. So we’ve now got a whole community that was drought focused and now the community has become flood focused. “We’ve got too much water, how can we protect our towns and communities. I don’t want flooding on my land how can the Government help me to not have flooding”? Whereas three or four years ago it was all “well how can you get some water to me”? You have the natural variability of the Australian climate and you have to try to put in place policies that reflect this variability. So that under dry times you can adaptively manage your water to meet water users… and of course in dry times environment seems to suffer more. People see it suffering more and people want the Government to do something about it. “Why are the lower lakes drying up, why is there so much acid sulphate soil in the area, it’s killing off the fish?” A lot of is to do with simply there being any water around. “Oh can’t we build dams to save that water and we’ll push it down stream”. “Well yes we can build dams today but they may not fill for ten or twenty years, there’s no rain around, there’s nothing to fill the dam”. We’re seeing a cycle that I’ve seen before. You have a drought, you have floods. People’s needs change with droughts and floods. I think we just need to be adaptive enough to deal with those and water management will always get caught in the middle of the community. The expectations of the water user lobby groups who want water and the environmental water groups who want water for their purposes. Somebody said to me at one stage “if they’re all a bit unhappy we’ve probably done a good job”.
You mentioned there some other emerging issues, the coal seam gas issue for instance and that to do with aquifer interference is it? Can you tell us a little bit about that? I can only tell you a little bit about it in terms of… we’ve had considerable demands on us to provide our groundwater models to various coal and mining private firms who want to utilise our models to understand the groundwater processes. Where the water is and how the water flows through the aquifers, the hard rocks and how their mining operations are going to impact on that. I think staying away from it a little bit at this point in time until the political issues around coal seam gas settle down. Until we get to what are the real technical issues and then the models have the potential to provide some of those answers. Obviously the models will be tools for our groundwater experts to formulate their responses to what coal seam gas may or may not be doing or the potential to impact on the groundwater system. Also to try and identify some of the risks, there might be significant risks that the community will have to accept or not accept in the future. What changes have you seen as a modeler in the use of technology? How has that impacted on the work that you do? That’s an interesting question. People have different ideas of what models are. Some people think a model is a physical model that you can go and look at on the ground. There are physical models around. I worked in that area where you might have a model of a dam and people want to know if I push a flood over the top of this dam will it fail? We’re going to have a flood in this valley which area will it inundate. So physical models of systems are still used today and they have their place. They tend to be expensive but if the issues need them they build physical models. In computer models… a computer model can be anything as simple as I started off with a slide rule, using a slide rule to solve a mathematical equation. When I first started we had some little Hewlett Packard type of calculators or processors I think that you used to have punch tape running in. Then when I was at North Sydney there was a computer company up the road and we used to punch cards in the office. We’d punch out all these cards. You’d have hundreds of cards for all instructions to run computer programme. I’d walk up the street and drop them off at the desk and the person at the desk would say” thank you very much, come back tomorrow”. I’d come back tomorrow and I’d have all these cards come back and I’d have about two or three hundred millimeters of print out that I’d have to go back and analyse and go through. Then we got our first desk top computers. We thought these were wonderful and we had one for all twenty of us. We had this one person who’d know how to write code. They’d enter it in and punch it in and generate lots of pages of output for us to go away and analyse. Gradually we got more and more. I remember at one stage we had eight centered in the middle of the room and we all went and used those in turn for our modeling. I left the department for nine or ten years and when I came back we all had computers on our desks. Computers have got faster and quicker and larger capacity to store lots of memory. Models that we used to run for days now run for ten minutes. It’s a significant change. The problem is that as soon as you build something faster and quicker somebody wants to know more and more and more. More information and more outputs, for example our computer models are used at the Murray-Darling Basin at the moment. They’ve linked all our models together and they run a batch of about twenty computers all linked together and they have huge amounts of storage to store all this information. There are gigabytes and gigabytes of information. So we’ve come a long way from slide rules to Hewlett Packard processors to multi processors these days.
What makes a good modeler? A good modeler needs to pay attention to detail. A good modeler needs to think logically and have processes in place for applying that logic and checking the outcomes of the process. A lot of modeling requires you to prepare a lot of data. A lot of modelers spend more than half their time collecting the data, sanity checking the data. Getting it together in the right form to run the model, run the model is sometimes the easy bit. Then you’ve got the next hard bit of looking at the model results. Are the model results right? You need to question the model results. The old saying “garbage in and garbage out” always applies with the model. So you need to look at the results, do the results look right? If there is something strange about the results question them. Don’t assume that they’re right question the results. Go back and understand the logic of the model. I’m still surprised today by looking at model results at something that I don’t think looks right. I go back and check it through, check the logic, check all the processes. It turns out to be a reasonable outcome. So I think the persons has to have good data handling skills, good checking skills and has got to have a methodical process in place to deal with that. Once you’ve got all that in place then you can start to be a bit creative and think laterally. But you need to have those fundamental skills in place. They’re some of the skills that I encourage in our juniors to develop at the moment. So how does modeling support good policy making? Good modelers need to understand the role of modeling in policy making. Modeling provides tools, provides information to help policy makers make good decisions. It can show them what the impacts of their decision might be. It won’t be a perfect answer but if we do this, this might be the impact. The impact might be small, the impact might be large. So you have some understanding of what the risk might be in making a decision. If the change is likely to be small then you may be willing to accept that risk in making that policy decision. If the modeling is showing big changes from that policy decision then that raises the flag of “well is that something that you really want to implement”? These might be the impacts of those decisions and if they are what sort of policies might we have to put into place to counteract those types of decisions. I think good modelers need to understand that models are part of the policy making process. So a model for modeling sake is a waste of time. You need to understand where modeling fits in. You need to understand who your client is. Who you’re developing this modeling for? What do they want to use the modeling for and provide them with a tool that’s robust enough to answer their questions and is robust enough to be scrutinized by external parties. You’ll always have water users or environmental groups saying “I think your modeling is wrong”. So you need to be comfortable that you’ve built a robust enough model that can be tested, demonstrated even peer reviewed if the case may be.
Looking forward, where will be applying our skills and resources in modeling technology and practice? I think a lot of the fundamental modeling we do today we’ll still be doing tomorrow. The issues are going to be more along the lines of people will be asking different questions of the model or expecting more out of the model. We’re going to have to collect information to support the models. A lot of the models at the moment are based on a little bit of information. Somebody said this is how we do it or somebody thinks these two processes interact in this way. So as we challenge the models more and that will happen and I’ve seen it happening and it will continue to happen. We need to look at collecting data to support those models. We’ll need to model those processes a lot better. The fundamentals will still be the same. It will be modeling the processes better so we can answer the different questions that are inevitably going to come forward. What has been most satisfying to you in your career? Looking back the most satisfying thing has just been working in the water industry. I’m still here. I say to people “if you don’t like the job, don’t hang around go and find something else to do”. So I enjoy what I’ve done. I’ve had the ability to travel around the state and look at a whole range of water issues. In the early days I was out there with a pick and shovel digging and installing a gauging station. I’ve seen most of the rivers of NSW, more inland I haven’t seen the coastal ones but maybe that will come later. Also working with the variety of people in the industry, I’ve made lots of friends. Lots of guys I went to uni with are still around. We’re all approaching retirement so we’ll get to that point in the fullness of time. I think it’s just being involved in something that I enjoy doing. As I’ve worked longer in the industry I’ve developed the experience and knowledge. I feel I’m in a position where I’m able to pass that knowledge on. I’m able to say “oh we’ve done that before it didn’t work, lets try something else”. I’m able to say “oh we didn’t quite get it right last time, let’s have another go, I think we should be able to solve that problem”. There the main things really. I’ve been comfortable working in the industry through a range of good and bad times. We’ve had droughts, we’ve had floods, we’ve had lots of governments, we’ve had years when water resources had lots of money and years when water resources doesn’t get very much money. All of those situations and being able to work through them with a good group of people, that’s probably the most satisfying thing.
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