
Billions of litres of water vanishes from Australia's most vital river network - adrian_mrd
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm
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manicdee
There's no mystery.

The water is being stolen, or the water never existed anyway. Water
allocations are based on a single year which had high rainfall. Models
attempting to predict rainfall are problematic, and models attempting to
predict available water following measured rainfall are confounded by over-
extraction (ie: water theft).

Water theft is being made increasingly easier by reducing the funding
available for policing the regulations.

If you want a summary of the political situation around water rights in
Australia just search for "Angus Taylor water rights" or "Barnaby Joyce water
rights". Our government is openly corrupt and they make no attempt to conceal
it.

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steelbrain
The link seems incorrect. I think you meant to link it to

[https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-03/the-mystery-of-
the...](https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-03/the-mystery-of-the-murray-
darlings-vanishing-flows/12612166) instead of

[https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm](https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm)

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anitil
There's a lot of smart people on HN, so it's worth asking.

Would it be possible to detect water theft from satellite imagery?

I don't know enough about any of this, but besides the obvious difficulty
(trying to measure a 3D object with 2D imagery), water flow in Australia is
inconsistent at best. I don't even know what kind of historical data we have
available.

Anyone interested? My email is in my bio

~~~
ruffrey
Former head of tech at water data startup In California here. Imo the data on
water rights is way too messy and complicated to do this. Also there are
things like private canals, utility owned canals, in addition to govt
aqueducts. Utilities release water for lots of reasons. It is as much a data
quality and secrecy problem as a computer vision or sensor problem.

Things in Australia are a lot more centralized. It seems like Australia would
be one of the best places to try.

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pvaldes
Excellent presentation and interesting problem, but is not exactly a mystery
to figure out what happened...

Severe Bushfires season in 2019. "Where is our water?" in 2020

Your water is in the ocean

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bushfire_season)

