Water monitoring

Under the Water Act 1992, water resource investigations are carried out to allow effective planning for water resource development and environmental protection.

An ongoing program across the Northern Territory (NT) assesses water resources by collecting, organising and analysing data about water:

• volume
• flow
• characteristics
• quality
• flood water level alerting.

Who's involved

The NT Government's water monitoring teams measure and determine the state of the natural resource.

Water monitoring is crucial for assessing and managing water resources. This includes activities like:

• surface water monitoring (hydrography)
• groundwater monitoring
• environmental flow monitoring
• flood network monitoring.

The teams are also responsible for:

• overseeing a network of over 150 surface water sites and over 580 groundwater sites
• gathering data on rainfall, river levels, river flow, groundwater levels and water quality.

Key monitoring programs

Key monitoring programs include the following:

• Ongoing monitoring of all water allocation plan (WAP) areas to track groundwater level and stream flow against modelled predictions used for annual water allocations.
• Management of flood warning infrastructure along key waterways as part of the NT flood warning system.
  • Ongoing flow measurements of flood discharges are required to ensure the accuracy of flood warning systems in our highly dynamic riverine environment.
• Flood level monitoring and alerting for key transport infrastructure - including highways and railways.
• Providing data for assessment, design and viability studies for future water supply infrastructure - including the Adelaide River offline storage (AROWS) project.
• Monitoring for assessment of small and large scale water extraction projects outside of WAP areas.
• Groundwater monitoring program partner projects, such as:
  • using aerial geophysics instrumentation to locate groundwater resources
  • the managed aquifer recharge trail near Katherine
• Collection of surface and groundwater data to assess water resources within the department’s own land and water suitability studies.
• Monitoring of water quality parameters in permanent waterholes in the arid zone as part of the Lake Eyre Basin Rivers Assessment (LEBRA) program.
• Water metadata (data about data) is collected when a monitoring site is initially setup, and updated over time as conditions at a monitoring site change.

Where monitoring takes place

View the water monitoring site maps for the following WAPs:

• Berry Springs monitoring network map PDF (4.0 MB)
• Georgina Wiso monitoring network map PDF (681.5 KB)
• Western Davenport monitoring network map PDF (962.9 KB)
• Katherine Tindall Limestone Aquifer monitoring network map PDF (317.5 KB)
• Mataranka monitoring network map PDF (1.1 MB).

Read more about water allocation.

Get data

To view the data collected, go to the NT Water Data Portal.