HydroNET Australia presented at the New Zealand Hydrological Society Conference 2021
HydroNET Australia was very happy to present the HydroNET Water Control Room for Melbourne Water (MW) at this years New Zealand Hydrological Society Conference.
Click here to view the Presentation.
The HydroNET Water Control room provides MW with easy access to and use of their disparate data to generate personalised dashboards, forecasts, alerts, notifications and reports on-the-fly without burdening the data source and system administrators and without the need to implement a new data warehouse.
The perceived benefits include:
- Improved rain data for improved alerts
- Bridge interface gaps with IoT, Hydstra, FEWS, web and Urban Drainage Visualisation
- Expert systems that are difficult to get data out of
- Simpler, easy data sharing with internal/external stakeholders
- Transparency – Collating and Sharing of big data (Council Dashboards)
- Live data and alerts
- Safety of our Community and Community Resilience
- Potential to Connect to Emergency Victoria App
Aims
Melbourne Water have extensive monitoring equipment and data management systems to assist them to play a leading role in supporting them and their partners to prepare for, respond to, and recover from potential flooding events and other urban drainage related management responsibilities across the region. However, that data is located at various disparate internal and external data sources only accessible to technical experts, leading to workarounds and delays in providing the personalised information required by staff, management and partner organisations (Metro Councils and VicSES) for effective and coordinated decision making around events. MW thus sought to improve this information provision by implementing the HydroNET Water Control Room
Method
The implementation of the HydroNET WCR was conducted using an Agile approach over four phases. The project commenced with an initial functional design phase to formulate the various HydroNET dashboards required. Secure, real-time connections to the required disparate hydrological and meteorological databases where then configured in a second phase.
Digital Delta Approach:
The HydroNET WCR methodology is known as the Digital Delta approach, where all services are delivered directly from the disparate data centres, over the internet, removing the need to duplicate data and circumventing any versioning issues while ensuring that the user is seeing the latest master data available. A further benefit is provided by the HydroNET WCR architecture, which uses a HydroNET server hosted in the cloud to do the intensive data processing required to support the various tools, and the HydroNET Portal to provide the individual users with the tools they need to visualise the information in the customised way they require.
Data Connections:
The HN WCR was initially connected to the MW Flood Information Decision Support System (FIDSS) providing MW users access to MW’s rain gauge, river level gauge, tidal gauge, water quality gauge and drainage basin gauge network data. The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) weather data FTP connection was also configured to provide BoM weather data, including their new Rainfields 3 high resolution, bias adjusted radar rainfall data and radar based high resolution, short term rainfall forecasts up to two hours ahead (known colloquially as NowCast). HydroNET also set up a further process to adjust the BoM radar rainfall data against the MW rain gauges to provide MW with a radar rainfall product with improved calibration against rain gauges.
In the 3rd phase, the HydroNET WCR tools were made available as an added value service to translate the archived and operational weather and water data into valuable tools, applications, personalised dashboards and reports. These were then used to set up initial benchmarking dashboards in support of an extensive Site Acceptance Testing (SAT) process that followed over a period of 12 weeks. This was guided by a SAT document and included an extensive issue identification and resolution logging process.
Once the SAT and benchmarking was approved, the final 4th phase – currently in progress – commenced. This is an initial 1-year trial subscription to the HydroNET software as a service (SaaS) system with included helpdesk, support and maintenance. The system will continue to be tested and improved during this trial.
Results
HydroNET now provides MW with simple, robust tools for accessing and sharing the live information required for various needs before, during and after events, based on the same underlying data. This greatly improves joint decision making. Staff now have numerous dashboards that can be configured in various ways by themselves without the need to request database administrators or programmers to do it for them.
Further work currently in progress includes:
- Connections to more cloud data sources for Urban Drainage Visualisation (urban drainage monitoring) needs, including the MW Hydstra database.
- Implementation of an alerting trial to provide flood alerts to Emergency Management Victoria.
- Dashboards for several Metro Councils to improve MW’s data sharing responsibilities.
For more information please contact Brian Jackson from our local Australian partner, Water Technology :
Email: brian.jackson@watertech.com.au
Phone:+61 3 8526 0800