Supporting tourism with Monthly Water Updates

Graph showing peak in Monthly Water Update usage corresponding with periods of high rainfall in the Lake Eyre Basin, with visits to the Lake Eyre Basin comprising most of the visits (approximately five times all the other drainage divisions combined).

Comparison of Monthly Water Update website traffic for Lake Eyre Basin with all other drainage divisions and rainfall

Our Monthly Water Update offers a quick overview of recent rainfall, streamflow, salinity and storage volumes across Australia. Each variable is compared to past conditions, so you can quickly see what happened in the previous month and how significant it was. 
  
Recent analysis showed that the Monthly Water Update is frequently being used to understand the situation in one of the driest basins in Australia.

In some months, the Lake Eyre Basin web page is being visited up to five times more than all other drainage divisions (as shown in the graph).

 

People are specifically checking the average monthly rainfall for the Basin. When the wet season starts in November, there is a steady increase in the number of people visiting the Lake Eyre Basin drainage division page. This continues until April and falls off rapidly until July.
 
Tourist operators that offer flights over the lake find the site useful to assess the chance of finding water there.