Welcome to NIWA's Instrument Systems Update. The 2009 irrigation season has started! The NIWA Instrument Systems team is heavily involved in designing, building, installing, commissioning, and supporting state-of-the-art irrigation technology; we also manage data generated by our instruments. Here we bring you news of some of our latest technology and projects.
NIWA’s Instrument Systems team has just commissioned three new state-of-the-art water monitoring and control stations on the Waimakariri Irrigation Scheme, one of the largest schemes in the South Island. The scheme has consent to abstract up to 12 cubic metres of water per second from the Waimakariri River. NIWA now has installed 14 control stations on the scheme.
Meet the Miniflume, a new system we have developed to automatically and accurately control the abstraction of small volumes of irrigation water. The system is ideal, for example, to control water abstraction when filling a farm storage dam.
NIWA telemetry instruments form an essential component of a new centre pivot irrigation system at Station Peak, in the Waitaki Valley. The water-metering system was installed, and is maintained by, local contractors. Integrating water flow-rate sensors with a NIWA GPRS telemetry system enables Station Peak’s owners to concentrate on farming, while management of their water resources is automated and accurate.
NIWA has recently supplied and installed 17 automatic rainfall stations in the Fiji Meterological Service’s (FMS) new telemetered rainfall network. This rainfall monitoring network forms part of an upgrade to the FMS’s climate monitoring capability.
