Hydrology and water resources
The team of engineers at the Water Research Laboratory have specialist expertise to provide solutions for critical water resource issues.
This includes the hydrology and quality of runoff in urban catchments, water budgeting, reservoir operations, environmental flows and the sedimentation, geomorphology, and flooding of rivers.
With a strong foundation in the fundamentals, WRL is well placed to make proper use of hydrological models, to understand their strengths and weaknesses and to ensure models are properly calibrated and interpreted. WRL combines these skills with the other expert services of groundwater and civil engineering hydraulics to provide an overall study of water resources.
Recent studies have concentrated on the water quality of road runoff, harvesting of catchment runoff in a western reservoir, environmental flow regimes to protect riverine ecology, design of a sediment trap slot to reduce riverine sediment loads, and improvement of water quality in drinking water reservoirs through management and engineering options
Key areas
- Hydrology and water quality in urban and rural catchments
- Flow, sediment transport and geomorphic behaviour of rivers
- Environmental flows
- Reservoir dynamics and water quality
- Floodplain modelling
- Flood risk and hazard assessment
- Water budgets
Typical projects
