A key component of the Bureau of Meteorology’s (the Bureau) water information strategy is to build the Australian Water Resources Information System (AWRIS) to be the authoritative repository for water data and reporting in Australia. The Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric (Geofabric) will be the geospatial framework that will underpin AWRIS. It will hold key spatial data layers within a single, consistent, national geospatial framework for hydrological features.

The Geofabric project is being led by the Bureau in partnership with Geosciences Australian (GA), the Australian National University (ANU) and CSIRO. This partnership will collaborate on the provision of the foundation hydrological data and will assist in the development of an enduring maintenance framework. This framework will be based on a simple conceptual model in the first instance that will evolve through time to include increasingly more sophisticated elements.

The Geofabric foundation data will initially include a topologically connected surface water hydrology that will be used to create a hydro-enforced digital elevation model. These data will then be combined to derive a set of physically based national catchment and reporting units from the whole of the continent down the individual stream reach. Foundation data will also include hydrometric monitoring points obtained by the Bureau through the Water Act Regulations. All of the features in the Geofabric will be spatially related using persistent unique identifiers.

This presentation will give an overview of the Geofabric project, the foundation data that will comprise it and some of the products that will be derived from it.