Maintenance of the gauging network

Throughout the 2022-23 period, WaterNSW completed several maintenance activities on its gauging system for the Scheme. The 2022-23 experienced high rainfall in the first half which posed many challenges for the gauging network, resulting in more maintenance works than in previous years. Water NSW could not complete all works in a timely manner due to the physical constraints high rainfall and floods posed to the network. Maintenance of the network is ongoing. Where gauges at key sites (Denman, U/S Glennies and Singleton) are down, backup gauges are available to continue monitoring the river. When gauges at sites with no backup are offline, Water NSW must extrapolate data using the water model to monitor and forecast flows. The number and types of maintenance activities is summarised in Table 6 below.

Table 6: Summary of the number of each type of maintenance WaterNSW completed on its gauging network in 2022-23.

Water NSW also monitors industry participants’ telemetry daily. When a participant’s telemetry is down, Water NSW will contact them to notify them of the issue and request immediate action for them to resolve. In 2022-23 Water NSW contacted participants 13 times to resolve telemetry issues.