News
SMEC’s
Water
Resource
engineers
present
at
the
2023
Floodplain
Management
Australia
National
Conference
in
Sydney
Specialists from SMEC’s Water Resources team will deliver technical presentations at the 2023 Floodplain Management Australia National Conference in Sydney. The annual event has been hosted by the FMA for over 50 years, and is the most esteemed flood risk management forum of its kind in Australia.

The conference promotes an industry wide discussion on making communities more flood safe, under the theme of ‘preparing for the unprecedented flood’. This year’s focus will apply lessons from recent floods and new research to better manage the increasing costs of extreme weather events.

 

 

Technical Presentations 

 

Is Local Knowledge Still Valuable? A Flooding Case Study in South-West Queensland

Evan O’Brien, Principal Engineer – Water Resources

Local flood knowledge has not previously been incorporated into flood studies at Cunnamulla, in south-west Queensland, leading to design flood levels much higher than anything ever observed, creating issues for the design of infrastructure in the region. This poster explains the steps used to reproduce observed flooding in a hydraulic model, using information from an out-of-print text that accurately described local flood phenomena in a time before satellite imagery or sophisticated computer modelling techniques.

 

A Thousand Gauges: Using Personal Weather Stations to Hindcast Extreme Flood Events

Jonah Chorley, Experienced Engineer – Water Resources

This paper investigates crowdsourced Personal Weather Station (PWS) data that can be used as an alternative to current Government datasets. The utility of the PWS data is demonstrated by using it to hindcast a recent extreme flood event, that occurred in February 2022, Brisbane, Queensland.