NSW Farm Dam Survey

Water availability is highly variable across NSW.

• Many parts of NSW continue to have low farm dam levels, at below 20% of their capacity, particularly in central and western NSW.
• The influence of recent rainfall since 20 March has not been captured in this assessment.
• The farm dam assessment was not possible for some parts of NSW due to missing data.

The Farm Dam Water assessment draws on the DEA Waterbodies product which detects all water bodies in the size range of 3125 m² – 10 km². Landsat remote sensing data is used to compare the current water surface area in each water body to the maximum extents on record between the year 1987 and present. Large storages that are potentially part of irrigation schemes or river reaches are excluded from the analysis. This provides monitoring of around 50,000 farm dams each month.