What is HydroNET?
Climate change and increases in urbanisation result in water professionals having to deal more often with excessive rainfall, flooding, water quality issues, longer periods of drought and rising sea levels. Easy access to the right information is essential in reducing impacts and risks before, during and after events.
HydroNET is a multiple award winning web-based decision support portal which combines weather and water data with models and knowledge to provide sustainable, innovative, environmental solutions for solving urgent water problems. The platform connects real time relevant weather, geographical and hydrological data, via smart applications, and translates the data into personal online decision support dashboards available on desktops, smartphones and tablets. The HydroNET Portal and its applications support users across the board: hydrologists, insurers, farmers, disaster managers and many others with decision making tools on water related issues. These applications add value to meteorological data translating it into tailored solutions. The applications available include RainWatch, Water Auditing and the Water Control Room.
Typical information screens are shown in the following figures:
Engagement between the Department, the South African Weather Service and HydroNET
The suitability of the platform was tested during a collaborative project funded by the Dutch Government called the Partners for Water Project (PFW) to explore how SAWS and Water Sector users could benefit from the HydroNET platform. This project showed that the various sources of data (radars, rainfall stations, model data and satellite information) could be combined with user information (dam and streamflow information, water quantities and water quality parameters etc) to provide the best available data via user friendly formats such as interactive maps and graphical displays easily accessible via the web.
The first user was the Inkomati Usuthu Catchment Management Agency (IUCMA), with a subsequent rollout to the Pongola uMzimkhulu Catchment Management Agency (PUCMA).
In July 2018, the DWS and SAWS entered into a Contract to replicate and rollout the IUCMA HydroNET Water Control Room system to all 7 CMA’s. Following the closure of the 2021 contract between the South African Weather Service (SAWS) and the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) for the provision of HydroNET to the Catchment Management Agencies (CMA), a new contract was instituted for the continued provision of HydroNET services from September 2023 to September 2025 and signed 24 January 2024.
According to the National Water and Sanitation Master Plan (NWSMP) “Reliable data, information and knowledge on the status of the country’s water resources is required to understand and enable spatial and non-spatial analysis and presentation of water use and water demand including the manner in which various economic, social and environmental activities in catchments affect (consume, pollute, increase) or constrain (limit, degrade) water quality, quantity and ecosystems.
Reference to HydroNET is made in the NWSMP. It is a proven web-based decision support system that combines weather & water data with models and knowledge to generate personalised overviews, forecasts and warnings tailored to the needs of the clients and stakeholders. With this system water professionals can make well-informed, transparent and accountable decisions for managing water resources and for sharing relevant information with stakeholders and partners.
The HydroNET system with its key weather and water applications will capacitate the CMA’s with real-time access during the two years of the Contract to various dashboards, reports and tools empowering them to make the right decisions at the right time in a country where every raindrop is critical for the sustainability of water management in South Africa.
The Project implementation plan
As per the Contract there are various tasks and activities to be covered over the 2-years (21st November 2023 to end 21 November 2025). At a high level the activities have been summarised into the following key deliverables:
- Communication and Project management
- Project progress Meetings
- Reporting
- National Steering Committee Meetings
- Training and capacity building
- HydroNET community and Knowledge sharing webinars
- Configuration of new users
- Providing support for the configuration of new dashboards and service
- Configuration of new functionality and new data sources
- Operation, maintenance and hosting of HydroNET platform and applications
- Regular Updates and Upgrades of the applications
- onitoring of platform and applications
- Technical Helpdesk and support & bug fixing
- Operation and maintenance of data connections
- Data licensing, processing and storage
The frequency of each activity and the timings of each across the 24-months are outlined in Table 1 below, for the first year of implementation against the Contract.
Feedback on the activities will be provided regularly in the monthly HydroNET Project Committee Meetings as well as the Quarterly Project Steering Committee (PSC) Meetings.
Table 1: Tasks and activities for the HydroNET Water Control Room for CMA’s
