 Welcome everybody for the final webinar of 2022. I'm Gordon. I work at HydroTerror Richards currently on the road in some poor reception, so he's hoping to join us, but we'll make do if not. So today's webinar is on smart cities and urban management, urban water management tools, future trends in urban water and information systems. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land in which we meet today, the Inarong people of the Kulin nation. I also pay my respects to their elders past and present. So today we're lucky to be joined by Warwick Bishop who's the director of water technology and just a quick background on Warwick. So he's the director of water technology and has over 25 years of experience in surface water management. He has a wide variety of projects covering areas such as flood risk management, water quality, sediment transport, coastal hazard, WSUD and environmental flows. Warwick has an honours degree in civil engineering from the University of Melbourne and a master's of engineering science degree from Monash University and investigating the detailed hydraulics of storm water treatment wetlands. Warwick's experience throughout Australia in both rural and urban context. Warwick has drawn on his extensive range of surface water modelling and management experience to develop the water information systems team at Water Technology. This team is focused on integrating water data analysis, processing and information delivery to improve the way water is managed in multiple contexts. Like always we enjoy audience input so if you have any questions throughout the webinar there's a little Q&A button. You can press that and just type in any questions you may have and we will try to get through them at the end of the webinar and hopefully have some answers for you. So the purpose of these webinars is to share knowledge at Hearted Hero. We consider ourselves specialists in monitoring services. So yeah these webinars are designed to sort of facilitate the education so I was to lead the industry by understanding the needs of the industry. So that's why yeah we look forward to hearing from you throughout the Q&A. So today's webinar so Warwick will be sort of covering urban water management what the challenges are and then he'll sort of move on to how we can improve urban water management through smart tools. So Warwick I'll throw to you now. Great thanks Gordon. I'm really pleased to be here today to join Hearted Hero in this webinar. I actually know Richard from a long time back we played hockey together about 30 years ago. So strangely enough we ended up in similar or related fields and really pleased to be able to present some info today in this webinar series. So just to start off with really thinking about what are the urban water challenges at the present time and also looking forward. There's really a lot of I could see the stresses on the landscape on that urban landscape and here there's just an image you can see with I think this is Gardens Creek so what would have been originally a natural waterway has been completely channelized and turned into a concrete trapezoidal channel with the commensurate sort of degradation in environmental values and amenity values. So that's a really detrimental consequence of urban development historically. We obviously don't do that now in greenfield areas but that's sort of what's happened due to intensification and growing population in urban areas in the past. Not only is that impact on waterways but there's an increase in flooding risk associated with urbanization because as people probably know increased impervious areas leads to increased rates of runoff particularly from short duration thunderstorm type events and the other impact that urbanization has and increases in urbanization over time is an impact on water quality and that's related to not just the nutrients and sediment that comes off urban catchments into waterways but also the timing of flows, the temperature of flows, the level of oxygen in the water, all those and things like heavy metals and so on that runoff come off road, runoff all those sort of things impact the water quality in streams and the health of the ecosystem in waterways. We keep going there. Right and so in terms of thinking about what's the status of the urban environment in terms of surface water I think it's important to having that forward-looking picture to really contemplate climate change and that's something that as a community thankfully everyone's become more aware of I think and in recent years it's been an issue for a long period of time but it's becoming far more prominent in our thinking as a broader community not just as specialists in the water industry. But the key drivers if you like of change related to climate, the impacts of climate change into the future are twofold. The obvious one being that increase in temperature which is the direct result of that increase in greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and what that leads to in terms of the landscape is higher evapotranspiration that leads to ecological stress for plants and animals in the environment and very significantly there's a real risk going forward of increased human health impact through heatwave and I'm sure everyone's seen sort of statistics and I don't have numbers off the top of my head but we all know that going forward there's likely to be far more of those extreme heat days sort of above 40 type temperatures or even above 35 and under those circumstances it's actually really significant human health impacts and leading to sort of people needing care but also significant numbers of deaths are actually attributable to heatwave and I think I saw something recently and I don't know the numbers but the consequence of the heatwave recently or earlier in the year in Europe where you had I think nearly 40 degree temperatures in the UK for example which is just hard to comprehend. There are I think tens of thousands of casualties in terms of people impacted by those things so really significant impact in heat and I'll come to this a bit later I think but the important aspect there in terms of water management is the ability for the way we manage the landscape in the urban context through vegetation and application of soil moisture and canopy cover and irrigation so forth there's an ability to actually have a significant impact on that heat signature going forward. The other impact of that increase in temperature is a reduced water availability so the expectation is that overall our climate is going to become drier so our main annual rainfall will likely reduce and that could have a very significant impact on the rates of yield from our storage reservoirs and our catchments. Obviously we've got something like the de-cell plant which can supplement our water supply but that's a pretty expensive and not a not a very environmentally sympathetic way to produce water it's has some negative consequences it's very expensive and it uses a lot of energy so it's not a it's not a sort of situation where we don't have to worry about water resources giving you just turn on the de-cell plant if there's other ways we can supplement our water supply then it's a far preferable outcome and the sort of juxtaposing that decrease in overall rainfall is an increase in the intensity of rainfall so although we may on average get less total rainfall average year to year there's a high likelihood or we know essentially that storm intensities are going to increase under climate change and that's simply because if nothing else a warmer atmosphere has a greater capacity to to hold moisture that's why we have much higher rainfall intensities in the tropics and you do in the temperate zones and as everything warms up that those sort of zones of more of increased rainfall intensity actually move south so we're in Melbourne where where I am we're likely to experience sort of rainfall intensities that that we haven't experienced in the past that we're associated with areas further to the north and that has a big impact on urban flooding due to that that low perviousness of the catchment. The other impact of climate change is sea level rise and this does certainly does have a big impact on urban areas because so much of our urban population lives near the coast and coastal cities and a lot of coastal areas of coastal cities are in low-lying parts so if you think about Melbourne for example all along the south bank of the Yarra south Melbourne Albert Park all around that sort of area in the Port Phillip council region you've got all the low-lying areas out the back of between Mentone and Frankston or through that sort of swamp area the back swamp in behind the coastal dune a lot of very low-lying areas through there are all extremely prone to inundation from increased tidal levels and storm surge under a sea level rise. The other thing with increased sea level you get increased erosion of beaches and loss of sand so that that requires either defences to be put up to prevent erosion or things like beach renourishment which there's a lot of that going on at the moment where sands pumped from offshore up onto the beach which again is pretty expensive. Thanks Gordon and so that's sort of the context I guess of where we're headed with the impacts of climate change not just we've got enough problems just with the urban environment as it is it's just going to get worse with climate change looking forward so there's certainly a big challenge there. In terms of data and information we can only really make decisions and move forward if we're well armed with information that enables us to make those decisions and undertake management operations and do things in the urban context that are going to improve situation in terms of flooding or water quality or coastal inundation due to climate change. I think it's fair to say we live in an information age and there's just data everywhere we've got the internet I'm old enough to remember sadly well before the internet and and the only source of information was the encyclopedia or the library or something but now we've just got information at our fingertips and it seems like there's data everywhere. The question I suppose is do we have the right information or all the information we need to make the right decisions to improve amenity and reduce risk and protect people life and property and the environment and in that context what your what data do we need to make those decisions and where are the gaps? This little image you can see here is a 24-hour accumulated radar rainfall plot so all those colors represent cumulative rainfall you can see it's up to in the heaviest areas up to sort of maybe a hundred mil in some of those intense spots and this is rainfall caused by intense local thunderstorm activity and this is you can't quite see but in the middle of that plot roughly is Tamworth so this is in sort of northwestern New South Wales and the little dots you might be able to see around there little black dots they're actually rain gauges so all spread all around this area there's quite a lot of them are rain gauges recording daily rainfall now what becomes apparent when you look closely at this image is that none of those rain gauges essentially occur anywhere near the epicenter of any of those thunderstorms so what's happened if you just didn't have that radar rainfall information you just looked at the gauges you would essentially miss all these really localized intense thunderstorm activity and all the rain that occurred with that so the important thing about data is that you need it not just the right parameter and the general locality you need it actually at the right spot and one of the big changes going forward with information and in our management in in both rural context but certainly in the urban area is remote sensing that's a really important source of data going forward and I think we're going to be using that a lot more thanks Gordon so in terms of gathering that data and getting the right information you know how do we go about that this is an example of a gauging station there's a typical setup with a concrete wear and a and a gauge box and a gauge markers down the side those sorts of things are pretty expensive to set up and so you tend to find whether it's in rural catchments or urban catchments permanent fixed traditional gauging stations such as these are not that humorous if you like they're expensive to set up they're pretty expensive to maintain so inevitably particularly in urban areas one of the biggest inhibitors to accurate flood mapping for example is a lack of calibration gauge data that we can use to calibrate our models so you'd find for example across urban Melbourne we're on most familiar with virtually all of the urban flood models that are used to determine flood risk and drive planning outcomes across Melbourne virtually all of those are uncalibrated models simply because there's not the gauging data available to properly calibrate those models and that ultimately means we've got less confidence in the data that's being used and that creates uncertainty and conflict when it comes to disseminating that flood information to the community because they they may not necessarily believe it or they dispute it or and and there's also you know you really want to get that sort of thing right because it has a big impact on people so in terms of thinking about data then well what information do we have we've got gauges there's things like radar but there's other sort of sources of data that are coming on board now the traditional information might be a the bomb is a bureau meteorology you go onto their website they've got rainfall gauges daily there's pluvios which is five or ten minute or half an hour increment rainfalls at automatic weather stations which are spread around most of the capital cities and then around the country but even in somewhere like as big as melbourne the bureau of meteorology and you have a few a handful of automatic weather stations so there's a good chance that where you are if you are in melbourne that that you might have a automatic weather station two three five ten kilometers away which will give you reasonable information we won't tell you exactly what's happening at your location melbourne water has their own data councils sometimes have their own gauge information and so forth and then water utilities like the water supply companies or drainage authorities and so forth or irrigation authorities have their own information as well where things are going potentially there's a lot of discussion around the internet of things the iot and the iot utilizing essentially low cost sensors that can be widely distributed and that information collected and utilized i think from my point of view there's been a lot of promise around what iot can do for the water industry sort of more broadly but at this stage i'd have to say it's it hasn't been widely adopted or utilized and there's still probably some question marks around how effective or what might be the best way to utilize iot in the future because the there's issues around whilst the instruments are very cheap they may not necessarily be as reliable if you've got lots and lots of instruments out in the field you need something that's fairly low maintenance because whilst the instruments themselves might be cheap if it's going to cost you a lot of money to go out and maintain them and ensure that they continue to operate then that that might be prohibitive in terms of the budget that authorities have got available for that so and what are the data networks in terms of how that data is captured and uploaded and then used as well and the reliability of an iot device against a far more expensive like the old old school sort of gauge station that you can see in the picture there you know how much weight might you place on some data versus other data there's also looking forward i think you know potential for sort of crowd sourcing of information your mobile phones are the ubiquitous smartphone these days with all sorts of apps and and ways to upload information so particularly in the flood space one of the key pieces pieces of information that we use for flood calibration or or not really calibration so much as validations just to test whether we're our models are performing well and we're predicting water to be in the places where it should be is using uploaded photos and videos from social media so there's applications out there which will go and harvest images and information from social media and and package it up and you might be able to have access to hundreds or thousands of photos and video from a major storm that would create this um database if you like of information that you can then draw on to in order to to calibrate or to validate your models that's really a changing area there's also things like citizen science type apps which actually allow you to go and photograph something and tag it and upload it to a specific website and that information might go into a database that can then be utilized as well there's other sources potential sources of information from things like i know i've heard of i don't know any details about this but i am aware that someone might have been in europe i think was was looking at the potential for using the those sensors that that cars have a lot of cars have now the auto windscreen wiper sensors they have some sort of ability to capture the intensity of rainfall because it impacts on the speed of your your wipers so you think about thousands and thousands of cars with those sensors for rainfall intensity if you could turn that into some usable sort of information that might be another source for rainfall for example so there's interesting ways of capturing data that we possibly haven't even thought of yet that could be associated with the distributed use of technology such as cars or phones or computers and so forth and there's also as i mentioned before i think going forward that remote sensing is going to become a more and more important data source i think the the purpose of remote sensing is really to or not the purpose but what it can provide is really filling the gaps between those point sources of data so whether it's rainfall in terms of radar can can is very effective at creating a spatial very variable pattern of rainfall in between gauges things like satellite imagery that can detect water water extent is an inundation extent or can detect soil moisture can detect things like plant biomass or leaf leaf area index type information around the the status of vegetation can also there can be infrared imagery and so on that can pick up heat and things like that which which will have a really important role in the future in managing urban heat island effect and urban cooling and that sort of thing and heat waves as i said earlier so that whole remote sensing field i think is is going to be really critical to our ability to gather data and to use data intelligently in the management of our urban environment urban environment in the future satellites are becoming it's probably getting to be crowded up up up in the atmosphere or the out beyond the atmosphere but low orbit satellites are incredibly numerous these days and but they're they're becoming like everything better and better in terms of the resolution the frequency of flyover that the different sorts of sensors that they've got in the data that they can capture so there's there's definitely some some there's going to be some advantages in in how we can utilize that in the future the other thing i think it's important when we think about data for the urban environment is it's not just flow data or rainfall information there's a whole lot of other data that that needs to be integrated to be truly smart about how we look at the management of our urban environment and that's because everything sort of interacts everything's interconnected and everything interacts so the the built form the landscape demographics where people are you know being able to understand what the different land uses might be in terms of sensitive uses whether it's schools or aged care or hospitals or primary healthcare facilities understanding with those things are in the landscape and then being able to manage to maximize the benefits to those vulnerable or high value areas is really important as well so i think that's from a built form and a sort of a human perspective if you like there's also ecological aspects around well what are the ecological values of certain waterways you know the areas are more sensitive and others are their particular species that we need to focus on and so forth so there's a lot greater recognition i think going forward around the importance of managing the environment in urban areas thanks Gordon and so in terms of what we do with the data then this is really about this is where the smarts come in if you like how do we how do we access information that a lot of just shown there or that figure i've just shown there is just a screen grab from the Victorian state government order data site and it shows that there's a lot of info there a lot of information but if you go into that website i'm not being particularly critical of delp because they do a great job and they supply a lot of information but the way in which you access data and interact with data is in my view you know it really needs to be improved from both from a water management a water manager point of view but also from the community point of view the the access of public or the access availability of information to the public i think needs has a long way to go that spans across everything from rainfall weather information to flood information and environmental data the something that we've been involved with and this is a concept that's been developed in the Netherlands is called a digital delta approach and that's really the principle behind that is that there's no single source of data or single point of truth that will tell you everything you need to know data by its very nature is dispersed and and stored in different places and under the governance of different types of authorities and so on so there's no one single set of data that's going to answer all your questions the real strength in smart water management is to gather all the information that you need bring it together and put in a coherent platform where you can actually do some analytics value add on top of that do some analysis and then create an environment where you can make smart decisions based on that and i think the way going forward for that is definitely through a web type interface having smart online tools with apis that you can access and and build intelligence around and and hopefully get towards that what really is a smart city thanks Gordon so in terms of that that as i said moving towards a an actual smart city the in my view anyway that's really going from just having access to data and making data available to what are you going to do with that data so it's sort of i suppose in the past been described as decision support systems when i was earlier on in my career in terms of modeling and analysis of data we called it hydroinformatics these days you hear a lot more about your analytics and dashboarding and that sort of thing but it's essentially decision support systems as the same same beast but smart tools are really things for example like managing irrigation for plant health which we do currently in terms of these irrigation systems out there which will look at soil moisture and if there's a soil moisture deficit to apply some water but that's sort of one objective function that you might have for managing irrigation there could be other objectives such as cooling as i mentioned earlier heat waves are going to be a much bigger problem into the future and the capacity to irrigate an area not just to make it look nice and make promote plant health but you might irrigate an area to have a measurable impact on the local temperature of that zone so there's plenty of research information which bears out the the value of increased soil moisture and evapotranspiration in terms of reducing localized air temperature there's a really interesting study being done in Adelaide and i don't have the details of this but i'll speak to the researcher a while back and they're actually looking at the potential benefits of irrigating some of the areas around Adelaide airport to reduce the temperature and and save on on fuel for the planes actually taking off due to the increase in air density so there's things like that that you wouldn't even really think of as a potential upside to to managing soil moisture and evapotranspiration and air temperature there's i think there's a lot that's going to happen in that area in the future obviously harvesting stormwater for reuse to reduce our reliance on decale for example and and to adapt to a changing water resource availability into the future but not just harvesting stormwater for say irrigating an oval think about how you might intercept stormwater or store stormwater or or retard stormwater to mitigate flooding as well so thinking about southeast water for example have a system called talking tanks and that has a distributed network of valves that operate on rainwater tanks within properties to maximize the impact of storage on flood flood volumes and flood peaks within urban catchments i think that's an area that's definitely going to become more prominent into the future you can also use smart tools to do things like not just manage a particular situation at the time whether it's a flood or so on you might actually be something like a maintenance program for example so we've looked at applications where you could use accumulated rainfall within a catchment to predict when gpt gross pollutant maintenance might need to be undertaken so look at the pollutant load the amount of runoff that's occurred over a period of time and say well after this much volume passing this particular location in the stormwater network you're likely to have to have reached 80 percent of your capacity or whatever it is in that gpt you need to come in and clean that out rather than just having scheduled regular maintenance where the variability in flow would mean that sometimes you go and inspect that pit and it doesn't need to be cleaned out and you wasted your time using smarter ways to be able to schedule things like maintenance is an area where there can be potential upsides for councils for example and obviously things like warning and alerting using our sensors and our network of information to to inform the community inform decision makers about might be road closure or there's poor water quality in a pond or a lake and so you don't want anyone to have primary contact for health reasons setting up systems where that that sort of notification can all happen automatically and messages sent to decision makers who can take action but also information that can go to the public to keep them informed thanks Gordon so I thought I'd just get into some examples and talk about a couple of projects and and pieces of work that I've been involved with either directly or indirectly the first one I want to talk about is the spun city brain now this is a real-time decision support system for urban flooding and water quality that was developed for the city of Kunshan in China and that's a picture of the area there sort of if you can see there's a bit of an outline in the middle that's the area of Kunshan it's just to the west of Shanghai and as you can imagine China is a really heavily urbanized environment it has a lot of water management issues a lot of water quality issues and so forth and this particular area had challenges in relation to both flooding and water quality water technology and one of our key staff was involved with the CRC for water sensitive cities and putting together this system for the city of Kunshan and as I said the area itself is actually it's very flat and low lying it's what you describe what we we describe it's actually sort of a Dutch concept but as a polder and a polder is essentially an enclosed low lying area usually with a levee around it and or an embankment that doesn't effectively drain by gravity so the only way to really drain a polder and you have a lot of these in the Netherlands where there's areas below sea level the only way to to effectively drain a polder is with pumping so when you have an area like that you've got an enclosed catchment it's essentially like a large sort of retarding basin but clearly you don't want it to fill up because all the people in there will flood and so you need to manage your pump system and your drainage and channel system in order to minimize flood impacts and that's that's a real challenge a lot going along or hand in hand with that is because it's sort of an enclosed system there's a build up of nutrients and or there can be a build up of nutrients and a lot of unified conditions in those canals and poor water quality so the challenge is really how to best manage this series of canals and pumps and gates and so forth to optimize flood or minimize flooding optimize water quality and also importantly do that at a minimum cost because obviously running pumps and so on is pretty expensive so if you can manage your system in a smart sort of way to achieve either the same outcome at a lower cost through the way you manage your pump systems and your gates or potentially for the same cost actually come up with a much better outcome in terms of reduced flooding and improved water quality Gordon so yeah this is the study area that sort of pointed that out already you can see and they're just to the west of Shanghai it's in the yeah it's in a low land or low lying sort of near coastal areas I said it's very flat it's a little definition of the polder there hopefully I described it vaguely accurately and and on the right this is a showing the this particular polder and the characteristics of it you can see the blue light blue or the aqua blue lines are the waterways and the water bodies and then you've got wetlands distributed around there too for water quality improvement and then there's a number of there's little yellow icons or graphics illustrate where the pumps are so around the edge of that system at the end of each of the canals or the waterways you have pumps that then send the water over the embankment into into the neighboring sort of drains or river or somewhere that can get away so this is sort of a I guess a schematic of what the smart city or the sponge city brain looks like and it's a particular way that this program is described in China in terms of the sponge city program it's we would call it water sense of urban design but the sort of symbolism if you like of the sponge city is very much as it describes it's about rather than having the city as a hard surface where water just hits and runs off creating a city that's more of a sponge that can can absorb that water and hold it and all the benefits that sort of flow from that so that's sort of the symbolism around that the idea with the brain the whole purpose of that was saying well let's make it smart and let's have a central sort of system that can manage all these different data sources have optimization schemes in there and manage all those assets to get a better outcome so you can see the components on the left there's weather information monitoring data monitoring equipment and that catching that's gathering water levels water temperature flows gate status of gates and pumps all that sort of thing you've obviously got weather information in terms of rainfall sunshine temperature all those sorts of things so all that data is gathered and sent off to that central database there's a web interface which enables that data display and sharing enables the user to undertake system management and so forth that's sort of the user interface then on the right side you can see all that data that's gathered is contained within the database and includes things like for the water quality component the water sense of urban design treatment trains for those wetlands are included in there and the impact that they have on water quality is also included as part of the processing and then that forecasting system because there's an important component of a set around flooding so you want to be able to forecast what the likely maximum height might be for a particular storm when all the pumps are operating and and and there's been drawdown or whatever it is to try and optimize the system and then down that bottom right corner the optimization component so it's not just about understanding what's happening and forecasting what the conditions might be there's this this additional component in the system which is is to actually optimize the operation of those those hydraulic controls to to actually get a better outcome in terms of water quality and impacts and this is sort of what it looks like a little bit more it's still we sort of I guess a schematic but you can see here there's pollutant models there's hydrological models and so forth feeding into the central database and work server and that information then flows out to the user interface and there's an image just on the right side there showing what that looks like now this I can't unfortunately I can't read Chinese so I can't tell you what all these details show but this is just an example of the interface that was developed for the for the for the the user or the client group in Kinshan and that's giving them that ability to see what's going on there's graphs around the predicted and the optimized and so forth so just that typical sort of web interface where you you make all the data available you make it easy to read in terms of charts maps and graphs and then inform the user and then the user can make decisions around yes well let's go with that optimization scenario or maybe no there's some other consequence so we'll go over the different path thanks Gordon and this is just an animation which shows on the left is the before optimization on the right is after you can see at the end of the the flood that the two two images end up this is a flooding situation at the end they end up a reasonably similar situation but you can see on the right the actual peak the peak levels are much lower than on the left which is the the non-optimized version like thanks Gordon the next example I want to go through quickly is the Melbourne water drainage visualization and water control room project now this is something that water technologies developed for Melbourne water as a means of performing this data integration sort of function if you like across the Melbourne the whole Melbourne water area of responsibility so it's a huge area and Melbourne water has a lot of information but the challenges that they faced where they had many sources of data and they were struggling to find a way that they could bring all that information together to from an operational point of view or even just an analysis point of view to understand how their system was functioning they had a whole different different systems which had been developed for different purposes by different groups within Melbourne water so whether it was the sewer operations people or the drainage people or the water supply people everyone had sort of developed up their own data and own systems for their own purpose but it wasn't the ability for people to share that information across the business very easily it'd be a sort of manual download this manual download that stick it all in a spreadsheet muck around trying to understand what it all meant really really inefficient and very difficult to have visibility across all those data sources and what was going on so the challenge is really to provide that an interface that's accessible not just to expert users but to management and right through the sort of vertical vertically integrated across the business so even if they wanted to the MD could log into this system and and get some information useful to them about what was going on in Melbourne water's area of responsibility. The other great thing about potentially a web based system is it's accessible from anywhere so obviously in the sort of work from home scenario that we've been in the last couple of years that's really helpful also if you're remote out in the field or somewhere you don't necessarily have to worry about complicated VPN logins and that's the stuff you can just get on it anywhere you can get on a web page you can access a web portal and and get that information available to you know either on your phone or sitting at the airport or wherever it is that you want to do it. So the solution to all this was to first implement a hydrogenet solution and that's why go into the details of hydrogenet but that's a Dutch system that we work with that enables all these data sources to be pulled together and put into web dashboards. So this is just I guess a bit of an example of the challenges that Melbourne water faced. There's different lots of different pieces of data in here there's the FIDS system at the back you've got a hidester database Melbourne water had their own database internally they would share stuff on the web you've got the Bureau yeah and really that leaves people a bit confused as to what information do I get from where maybe go to the next one. So yeah so the solution in terms of what we've provided for Melbourne water is a what we call a water control room dashboard solution and that's essentially a series of customizable dashboards that can be shared between different users or different user groups and those dashboards display the particular information that's relevant for that user or for that team and those that the hydrogenet set up for Melbourne water it's got access to their FIDS system which is all their flood forecast information and their drainage performance information their hidester database which has again a lot of hydrographic data related to waterways and their drainage network and so forth and it can also be it's also connected to the Bureau of Meteorology so all the bureaus radar rainfall all their forecast data they're now cast their seven day forecast the ADFD that's all incorporated into the system plus I think there's things like webcams and all this sort of gear there's basically no end to what additional data can be plugged into the system so it's really created a centralized sort of unifying interface for all the different sorts of data that Melbourne water want to be able to utilize here we've got an example of a dashboard that's been set up specifically for the city of Casey to highlights all the catchments that are relevant to the city of Casey that either within or flow through that city and we can pull up things like what's the rainfall over the last 24 hours what's the rainfall predicted over the next 24 hours or the next three days you can then generate alerts based on that information as well so and that's really locally specific information there's already alerts provided by the Bureau of Meteorology for example in relation to future or flood watch for example you know future forecast rainfall but it doesn't go down to that catchment localized catchment level that we can with a system like this and Melbourne water's found this yeah really really helpful thanks Gordon just an example here this is also from Melbourne water this is what we call the rainfall exceedance dashboard and this is a custom this is an example of where you can really become smart with your data so this is an example of a customized analysis tool that builds on top of all that information that we've gathered together from Melbourne water through the hydrogenette platform in their in their dashboard tools and what this application does is it looks at either a particular point a gauge or an aggregated sub catchment layer which uses the radar rainfall information from the Bureau of Meteorology and then calculates either for a historic period so it could be a week a month a year 10 years in the past you could look at that period and analyze the rainfall data for that period could be the current so look at the last hour five hours 24 hours and also the forecast periods all the Bureau of Meteorology forecast data whether it's the now cast or the ADFD for the next seven days you can look at that forecast rainfall and determine on a catchment by catchment basis what's the likely or expected intensity of that particular rain event for that catchment and what it does you can see on the left side above the map there's a list of catchment names so Watts River Elster Creek so forth and then the across the top there there's different durations so you can see the 15 30 minute 1 hour 3 6 12 18 up to 5 days duration and for each of those storms for that particular period that's been selected and I think the time here is the date here was the 15th 11th to the 15th of October and for those for that particular window that period it's showing what the the peak intensity for each of those durations was in each of those catchments and then on the over on the right if you click on a particular location or a particular catchment it actually plots the accumulative rainfall in the storm burst and in the bottom right hand corner that's an IFD plots the the accumulative rainfall against the IFD curve so you can actually see straight away if whether that event was say a 5 or a 10 year event or or or what it might have been and that's really helpful for data analysis for understanding in the past what's happened in particular areas and what the impact of floods might have been you can also look at the effective use as a predictive tool to say well we think we're going to get a 50 year storm in the next four hours in this particular catchment and that then enables management actions to occur there so a really good example of sort of value out on top of the information. Thanks Gordon. So I think where to from here the in terms of really big you know smart cities is a bit of a term that's banded around quite a bit I think and I don't think we're really quite there yet. There's a lot of potential and there's a lot of thoughts around how we can become smarter but I think there's still quite a way to go for some of those things to be implemented and what we really need in order to do that is have better integrated data networks. So grab the information that we've got available from different sources pull it together and add new data sources such as remote sensing I mentioned before get the IoT device network sort of working and get that information coming in the crowdsourced data that I also mentioned earlier find out what are the most useful sort of sources of that and somehow integrate that into our decision making framework as well. It's then a matter of in order in order for us to be smart about it we need to understand what we're trying to achieve and what tools we need to get us there. I think web platforms are definitely the go building in that custom functionality that allows different user groups to get the information they need to make their decisions that's when we can really leverage all the information we have and become I think more nuanced in our approach to water management in terms of holding things we need to hold it in letting it go when we need to let it go increase treatment when it's needed irrigate when it's going to give the most benefit all these sorts of things in relation to the to the urban water system and having these systems in an interactive sort of fashion so that we we cannot just observe what's going on but actually game you know and look at well what if we do this or what do we do that similar way to what the bureau do they run ensembles of forecasts and and then the one they think it's most most likely to occur so I think that's really really the way the future I think that's my last slide good yeah thanks that work I just spoke to Richard and he's still having troubles so it sends his apologies you won't be able to join today so I'll just went through his slides quickly so on the right there's a photo of the UNESCO 17 sustainable development goals and so we've got the work required to deliver smart seed nirvana organizations data have a clear strategy that encompasses their goals and how they measure their success at all levels and people sometimes don't know what they need to measure that needs to be worked out and collaboration is pivotal between a variety of organizations to be able to use the infinite functionality and careful does the design is required to enable management to use iot to achieve operational efficiencies and reduce environmental impacts and then they're sort of working out the needs this is sort of a hydra terror schematic table that we use so initially it's about the design so the system system design system specification and it's about the supply so system supply configure and test system install and then we work down to operate so system oversight maintenance reporting and also training and then we worked into the monitoring activities it's about managing the resources logistics of the monitoring programs and also collecting so field measurements sourcing third-party data sheets it's also about site data management and then also finally reporting and what's needed to make it happen so if a sense of the wealth of different types of sensors is what I was talking about before so we need people who can integrate these sensors functionality to federate from multiple clouds so you bring in multiple systems together ability to write apis and scripts network management tools software to allow us to track assets and their status where it alarms in these sensors if something's going wrong so our teams notified and have a apply technical support when it's needed we need the instrumentation technicians and the it specialist to support those systems and so we need training to train support teams with knowledge of sensors to electric and software and so we need consultants to design the information outputs to meet stakeholder needs and then data specialists who can take our it outputs and produce meaningful data visualizations aligned with the consultants identified management needs so this is a hydrogen job at point Longstow and it's just an automatic gate that I've been closed with high and low tide so it means there's water circulation through there and there's another case study at the Melbourne Zoo high deter is involved in real-time monitoring of their vegetation to improve water efficiency so we see we've got so most probes there hooked up to telemetry data log of telemetry and we've got the solar power which supplies the power for the logger webinar takeaways so what we've learnt more the challenges are increasing so growing population intensification of land use causing a streasing stress on urban landscapes and these impacts are also compounded by climate change and the data needs to be used so harnessing the right data at the right time is an essential bit of planning and utilizing data to actually can result in both real-time and predictive control and also collaboration is key so we need collaboration between organizations which is vital to achieve full capabilities of integrated systems synergies it required from sensor all the way through to data visualization and we had a few early bird questions so thank you to everyone who gave us them what I think I would tackle these I can have a go definitely so in terms of our technology ties back to sustainable development goals I think there's not necessarily direct link there but certainly the better information and technology we have in terms of managing the surface water in our urban environment then hopefully that can lead us to a more you know more sustainable outcome in terms of meeting those goals whether it's you know the goals to do with health and water you know healthy use of water resources and all those you know there's a number of those goals in there which I think will be supported by the use of technology in a in a sort of sustainable way so I think it's vital that we have have better access and tools to manage to manage that the second one in terms of achieving ANZEC compliance then definitely you know you can't sort of you can't demonstrate compliance without measurements so those data networks are really important the sensors having the right sensors in the right locations is really important there's obviously cost limit costs sort of constraints if you like on data networks so it's being I think the key there is being clever around how you're using your best gathering and using your data measurements to demonstrate that compliance and whether there's in the future the ability to to sort of use some of these other methods such as as remote sensing and so on to augment in situ point sort of point source measurements one of the challenges of of any sort of point measurement is that it doesn't tell you necessarily anything about what's happening spatially and if you're talking about a waterway or a water body then sometimes you want to know more than just what's happening at a single point what do we consider when undertaking urban or river creek restoration and I think there's a lot of things to consider there's what one of the really important things is to consider what you want to achieve what's the outcome that you're looking for because urban environments are generally you know highly disturbed highly modified highly degraded and so in terms of what what do you want to get out of a restoration or process is really important to define that before you before you launch into it are you looking for and to be honest I think a lot of urban waterway management your restoration is around amenity for or human benefit not necessarily the environment but you may want to enhance that particular environment for you know that for example in mombol creek and shirney creek there's I know there's a focus on platypus habitat so you might you might really want to focus your restoration around what do you need to do to enhance that particular habitat in terms of the physical form and the revegetation and the ecological vegetation so classes and so on that that you would put into that and also you might be wanting to exclude actually exclude people's access to those areas for the for the benefit of particular species but yeah it just depends I think you really got to have a goal in mind of what you're trying to achieve and be realistic about that and then I can drive your restoration design the latest regulatory perspective on these recycled water from pipe retailer third pipe system and this is kind of not my direct specialty I'd have to say recycled water but I think there's still a little way to go from a regulatory framework perspective around integrated water management in general because the big sort of elephant in the room with with integrated water management is is is sort of reuse to potable particularly stormwater reuse to potable there's plenty of stormwater harvesting schemes have been put in place for irrigating council ovals and things like that for example but there's really nothing out there that that that's seriously contemplating going from stormwater to potable use and unfortunately that if we want to have really large-scale stormwater harvesting schemes in place then we've got to find a use for that water and in the urban area the most obvious use is is potable substitution so that's yeah we're just we're just not there yet with the regulatory framework for that but I expect that's something that's going to evolve over the next decade unless on top of recycled water from treatment plans clearly that's that's pretty advanced in terms of the tertiary treatment standards and what's required for different uses in terms of primary contact and so forth and the third pipe systems that are quite extensive through a lot of the greenfield urban areas where third pipe systems have been put in for for garden use and toilet flushing I think that's pretty well better down but it's the it's it's what we're going to do from the point of view of a harvesting storm or I think they've still got a way to go. Collation interpretation of real-time data this is certainly an interesting one there's there are issues in terms of accessing real-time information those sorts of that use of latency issues around how long does it take to get data from a collection point through a telemetry network or whatever it might be through to a receiver and then into a database and then you do you need to quality check it and how to use it and so forth there's I think we're getting better at that in terms of the Bureau of Meteorology Information and Melbourne Water Information for example that that stuff's all online and able to be incorporated into we've got that in our Melbourne Water dashboard application for example. Yeah I think the key there really is how you access and combine that that real-time data into a useful interface that you can do something with because real-time data is only really used to you if it's in an ingestible form that makes sense that you can do something about otherwise if you're not able to really do anything with it well it might be nice to look at but it's not helping you that much a good example of that I think is a radar rainfall so the Bureau of Meteorology radar images are pretty ubiquitous everyone would just about looks at their phone pretty regularly when their storm's on you can go and look at those coloured maps and you can see well there's a storm coming but it doesn't actually tell you how much rain there's going to be whereas Melbourne Water has utilisation of a system and the Bureau does this but that it's not necessarily readily publicly available they have calibration of that rainfall data in real time and you can access that data and we bring upgrades in hydrogenette for example where you can click on a pixel and it'll tell you actually how much rainfall is there and how much is predicted in the next three hours so the key is turning that data into something useful that you can then make a decision based on problems with algae in urban lakes ways to mitigate this well algae in urban lakes is generally resulting from eutrophication which is an excess of nutrients in that system beyond what it's got the natural capacity to absorb so that's primarily in urban areas that's due to the high nutrient runoff from urban land use and that might be from you from your streets and private lots but it can also be from things like golf courses or areas that might have high application of fertilizer and then results in high nutrient runoff into those sorts of areas the mitigation for that is really pretreatment of that water before it gets into the lake to try and strip nutrients out the other thing that we do is Melbourne Water has essentially turned all the lakes into wetlands and increased the productivity of those so that there's more nutrient uptake than the macrophytes the emergent macrophytes in those water bodies to sort of try and take some of that nutrient out of the water column but the key thing is really improve our runoff to generate the nutrients in the first place so treat that at source and then and then if you can't do that then have stormwater treatment measures such as wetlands biofiltration systems rain gardens grass swales all those sorts of weasel treatments that can pretreat urban stormwater before it actually gets into a lake and causes that eutrophication problem with the algae growth and number seven real-time stormwater quality assessment and scope for large-scale first flush and I'm just trying to work out what that means um so I guess that's really asking is there is there scope for improving stormwater quality through first flush pollution diversion systems now I assume what this person may be getting at is the first flush is something people might be familiar with it in terms of rainwater harvesting systems into a rainwater tank at a lot scale where where the first bit of water that runs off the roof or whatever hard surface that you're capturing from gets diverted out of the system and doesn't go into your rainwater tank because it the notion that notionally the idea is and this is backed up by data is that first bit of runoff can be quite high in nutrients and pollutants so you basically eject that and then let the rest of the water go into your rainwater tank so you improve the water quality in your tank at a macro scale you could theoretically do this for a whole stormwater system by um ejecting that first part of the stormwater runoff um either into some sort of holding pond or infiltration system or maybe even into a sewer um you know that that's one option is you that that area of greater pollution you could actually put that into the sewer now I'm not suggesting you want to do this because that's actually illegal but it hits um if if Melbourne Water and councils had a had agreement to do something like this you could potentially divert something like that into say the sewer system where it would go off and get treated and then the water stormwater that came after that could could go into into a pond for reuse or some other sort of purpose but I'm not I'm not aware of any proposal to sort of tackle that as a as a obvious solution to to stormwater quality I think there's probably better ways more natural systems we could use um to you know through wetlands and by retention systems to treat that first flush that's my go at those questions anyway awesome nice that warwick I think we've used up our house we'd like to leave it there um off of it we're kind of here conducting a trading needs so that at the moment something glades and it's going to post a link in the chat um so yeah help us tackle skills shortage and environmental monitoring um it's just a short quick survey so if you've got some time we'd appreciate if you had a go at that um and there's some contact details of about richard and warwick if you'd like any anything follow it up or any further questions um but yeah that we'll leave it there thanks again worry thanks for helping us out joining us that was awesome and um yeah we'll hopefully see you all you guys next year again thanks Gordon thanks everyone