A preliminary water balance was carried out for the Maules Creek catchment to assist in the establishment of an appropriate conceptual model for the aquifer-river system. Interactions between streams in the Maules Creek catchment and the underlying aquifer were assessed and the available data on stream flow, groundwater abstractions and surface diversions was assembled. Estimates of evapotranspiration and crop-water use have been assembled and the areas under irrigation defined. The results of this study have implications for understanding the impacts of groundwater abstraction, such as more intermittent stream flow due to enhanced stream fed aquifer recharge, and for estimating the sustainable extraction of groundwater from the regional aquifer.

This project demonstrates one approach to coordinating and analysing hydrogeological data to help

with the evaluation of catchment water management issues. The methodologies presented in this

report are not intended to replace existing approaches to coordinating hydrogeological data being

used by NSW state government water management departments. Rather the applications presented

complement.

Four software programs are used for this project: MS Access, ArcGIS, Mathematica and FEFLOW.

MS Access (http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/default.aspx) is used to coordinate the data from the

NSW Water Information Pinneena Groundwater Works CD, which is the primary data set for the

bore construction details and the standing water level measurements. This information is combined

with other continuously recorded climatic data from the Bureau of Meteorology and the Pinneena

Continuous Flow CD into a single MS Access database.

ArcGIS (http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/index.html) is used to coordinate all the 2D spatial

information. Important information in this database includes the digital elevation model (DEM),

geological maps, soil maps, landuse maps and the stream network.

Mathematica (Wolfram Research, Inc., 2008, http://www.wolfram.com/) is used for the plotting and

analysis of the hydrograph data, for constructing the 3D conceptual site model of the catchment

hydrogeology, populating the FEFLOW (www.dhigroup.com) mesh, and the post processing of the

modelled groundwater hydrographs. The Mathematica notebooks developed for this project have

been coordinated under the name Crystallize. These notebooks are to be placed in the public

domain. To use the Mathematica notebooks requires the purchasing of a Mathematica license. The

hydrograph analysis applications described in this report could all be used on the web by running

the applications using Wolfram webMathematica3 (http://www.wolfram.com/).This would make

the information on the Pinneena CDs accessible to anyone in a visual format.

Only a few representative data analysis applications are presented, because there are numerous

aspects to coordinating the data for a catchment, and approaches to analysing the data are open

ended. The components that are presented demonstrate working with the databases, the workflow

for key aspects of constructing a conceptual 3D geological model of a catchment, and pre and post

processing information when using FEFLOW for the catchment water balance modelling.

A copy of the MS Access database, ArcGIS database, all the Crystallize notebooks (Mathematica

.nb files), supporting Excel files and a MS Word document version of the notebooks are located on

the accompanying USB memory stick. Below, the contents of the USB memory stick are described

in more detail.