Assessment of Land Surface Diversions from water balance and remote sensing data

Abstract In the northern catchments of the Murray Darling Basin of Australia, a significant proportion of total water diversions are from interception of floodwater and overland flow during sporadic storm events. These diversions (known as Land Surface Diversions or LSD) prevent runoff from entering natural watercourses or into the floodplain. Due to adverse consequences of prolonged drought in the Murray Darling Basin, the authorities have imposed a 'Cap' on all forms of land surface diversions in the basin. A project was established in 2008 to compute LSD of six pilot farms to develop a farm water balance model and compute the LSD using a Remote Sensing (RS) technique coupled with on-ground hydrologic parameters which were collected through a concurrent monitoring project which also gave an independent assessment of LSD in order to validate the LSD by the remote sensing project. This paper reports on the results of LSD estimations for summer and winter crops in the pilot farms during 2007 and 2009 cropping seasons.