Water resources modelling for New Zealand
Use powerful, flexible water resources modelling software to maintain water supply, manage assets and infrastructure and mitigate the effects of climate change.
New Zealand benefits from a number of good quality water sources, including ground water, rivers, lakes and glaciers, and people and industries alike rely on this water to thrive.
However, demographic trends, increasing demand and the impacts of climate change are likely to place significant pressure on these water sources in the years and decades to come, and modellers, water resource planners and hydrologists should act now to ensure that New Zealand is able to maintain robust, secure water supply today and into the future.
Water supply challenges in New Zealand
Although New Zealand’s water sources are varied and numerous, there are a number of extant and emerging challenges that the country must face:
- The variability in water sources leads to varying and inconsistent quantities of water available across different catchments.
- Most areas of New Zealand have at least one river or aquifer that is under pressure and likely to fall behind demand in the short term (see the Avoiding Loss of Rivers factsheet).
- Historical and current water use has not been fully assessed across the country, resulting in limited visibility of impacts that have not yet hit.
- Increased urbanisation, and the growth of water-intensive industries such as agriculture (see the Agricultural Intensification factsheet), is placing growing pressure on supply and treatment infrastructure.
- Historical inconsistency in water management policy has led to a disjointed water resources landscape.
- Climate change is likely to cause more frequent and more severe extreme weather events—such as flooding and drought—and increase the stress on water resource systems, assets and infrastructure.
- Future investment challenges—due to their small scale, local entities can struggle to keep future costs down for the consumer.
These challenges will place New Zealand’s water supply network under increasing pressure. Fortunately there are tools and techniques that can help planners to address and resolve these challenges—one such tool is Hydro-Logic® Aquator.
How Hydro-Logic® Aquator can help
Effective water management benefits from a consultative, collaborative approach (as exhibited by the Canterbury Water Management Strategy, Watercare's Water Asset Management Plan for Auckland and the Water Services Reform Programme, formerly known as the Three Waters Reform Programme), so there is no single “silver bullet” that can address it. However, Hydro-Logic® Aquator can provide critical insight into future scenarios that can drive change at community, regional and national levels.
Hydro-Logic® Aquator is powerful, flexible water resources and water allocation modelling software that can help modellers, water resource planners and hydrologists in New Zealand to simulate a wide range of future scenarios to enable better current and future asset planning, investment and management decisions.
Capable of handling vast amounts of stochastic data to conduct meaningful strategic and operational analysis, its applications include water resources and drought planning, deployable output assessment, climate change scenario analysis, outage situation analysis, operational risk analysis and control curve optimisation.
Designed to inform, support robust water supply plans in the heavily regulated UK public water sector, the platform has been developed by experts with customisability and reliability in mind.
Hydro-Logic® Aquator is the only water resource supply software in the world approved to use Microsoft Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) to customise its models—making it uniquely capable of helping users in New Zealand to address the nation’s most important water management challenges.
Applications
- Conjunctive/mixed use water resource systems
- Public water supply
- River catchments, lake and reservoirs
- Groundwater
- Navigation and canal systems
- Irrigation resource management
- Hydropower
Learn more
Visit the Hydro-Logic® Aquator product page to discover more about how it can help you to make better planning, asset management and investment decisions.
Read our case studies to see how Hydro-Logic® Aquator has helped UK water companies to develop effective water resources plans:
Get a consultation
Contact us to set up a consultation to discuss your requirements and find out how Hydro-Logic® Aquator could help you.