Monthly Water Surface Area For On-Farm Storages In Northern Murray-Darling Basin

Northern Murray-Darling Basin data provides a monthly time series of water surface area for On-Farm Storages across five key valleys. Observations are derived from Landsat satellite imagery since 1987 and Sentinel-2 imagery since 2015, using a published geospatial model. The dataset includes polygon features linked to monthly mean area totals.

Use Cases

• Analyze MAX AREA trends against YEAR MONTH to model storage fill and drawdown cycles in response to climate variability.
• Track water scarcity by monitoring monthly mean area totals linked to POLYGON ID for licensed Flood Plain Harvesting storages.
• Compare FSL AREA to observed MAX AREA per storage polygon to assess operational efficiency and regulatory compliance.
• Model managed water movements by analyzing time series of area totals across the five specified river valleys.

Strengths

• Time series leverages long-term Landsat data starting from 1987.
• Methodology is fully documented as open-source code published by the department.
• Covers five specified river valleys within the northern Murray-Darling Basin.

Limitations

• Reported water surface areas are estimates due to inherent uncertainty in distinguishing wet and dry boundary pixels from medium-resolution satellite data.
• Data is served via ArcGIS services, which may require specific geospatial tools for access and analysis, limiting direct use in some ML pipelines.

Provenance

Source

Spatial Services (DCS)

Collection Method

Generated from publicly available Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery using a multispectral data and streamlined geospatial model.

Time Range

Landsat data since 1987, Sentinel-2 data since 2015.

Freshness

Updated to March 2026.

Geography

Five key valleys of the northern Murray-Darling Basin: Border River, Gwydir, Namoi, Macquarie-Castlereagh, and Barwon-Darling.