When will catchments recover from drought?
Project Leader: Murray Peel
Staff: Murray Peel
Collaborators: Tim Peterson (Monash University)
Sponsors: ARC Linkage Project, DELWP, Melbourne Water
Primary Contact: Murray Peel (mpeel@unimelb.edu.au)
Keywords: catchment management; environmental hydrology and water resources; groundwater; hydroclimatology; hydrology
Disciplines: Infrastructure Engineering
Domains:
We have recently shown that ~30% of Victorian catchments have not recovered from the Millennium Drought, which ended in 2010, and appear to be persisting within a low runoff state (Peterson (in-review) at Science and https://youtu.be/I-ja7soTDg0). This is the first evidence that catchments can have a finite resilience.
There are two projects that will statistically examine:
- If and when catchments recover from wet and dry periods
- If groundwater may also not recover form droughts.
Both projects are a collaboration between Monash University and the University of Melbourne through an ARC Linkage Project with the Victorian Government. The students will be based at Monash and be supervised by Dr Tim Peterson (Monash) and Dr Murray Peel (Melbourne). For both projects there is a $10,000 p.a. tax-free top-up, bringing the total stipend to $39,000 p.a.