National Irrigation Database How much water is required, and when How much water was applied, and when How much excess water was used A national irrigation database would contain data about......for every field in Australia

National Irrigation Database A great deal of detailed data is required. Some data is already being collected, if only it was available... How do we get the rest of the data ? Google Maps could be the inspiration Irrigators do the collecting

Existing data Water orders to Water Supply Authority Irrigation schedules calculated by irrigators Soil moisture measurements If this data was also on the web it could be used by a national database

Google maps and Google Earth Defined an xml schema for GIS data. A data format that can be shared. Data in a file in this format can be shown on a map or aerial photograph. Water orders can also be read from the same file. A National Irrigation Database can read the same file.

Irrigator sends water order to Water Supply Authority What happens now

Irrigator enters order on web form Orders via the web

What the Water Supply Authority would see Paul Torzillo requires 55 Ml on 13 February McWilliams requires 32 Ml on 12 February

What the National Database will see

What the irrigator would see

Irrigators who do not need to order water

What the irrigator and Water Authority would see

Web form could also calculate water requirements

Irrigators who measure soil moisture

What the irrigator and Water Authority would see

Soil moisture by telemetry to Water Authority

What the irrigator and Water Authority would see

Using Google xml schema A standard format is required The suggested format is the xml schema used by Google Maps and Google Earth This schema defines how data should be formatted for GIS mapping XML is extremely flexible Standard interchange format for data on the internet

Additional data XML is flexible - add extra data items Volume_Required, Date_Required Crop_Type, Daily_Water_Use Soil_Moisture_Status Total amount of water required by the end of the season

How the system would work

What is required - XML schema Required_Volume (cu m) Required_Date Current_Soil_Moisture (mm) Crop_Daily_Water_Use (mm/day) Season Total_Volume_Required (cu m) Crop_Type GPS coordinates

What needs to be done 1 Web form for Irrigators to order water. Can also be used to calculate and post irrigation schedule. 2 Crop water use data to be available on the web in an agreed standard format. 3 Water Supply Authorities to be able to read and accept water orders in the agreed xml schema. 4 All irrigation scheduling software to output a schedule in the agreed xml schema. 5 A national irrigation database could then be set up that would also read the xml files.

National Irrigation Database really quite simple and achievable

Just calculations next...

Calculating water required: drip

Calculating water required: flood

Calculating water required