North Bowen Basin region: Groundwater conceptual model data guide

Across Australia, groundwater is a vital resource that supports and strengthens communities, culture, the environment and numerous industries. Movement of groundwater is complicated, taking place horizontally, vertically and across different timescales ranging from weeks to millions of years. It is affected by changes in climate, human use and geological complexities such as the type, geometry and distribution of rocks. Understanding how all these factors interact is known as a groundwater conceptual model and it is an important first step. This groundwater conceptualisation is for the shallow groundwater in the north Bowen Basin as well as surface-groundwater interactions. Figure 1 shows the location of the cross sections used to conceptualise groundwater in the north Bowen Basin region. It also shows the combined (stacked) confidence for both salinity and water levels for the shallow (<50 m below ground surface) groundwater system in the north Bowen Basin. There is no publicly available geological model for the north Bowen Basin extended region. As a result, only the shallow groundwater system is included in this conceptualisation (Wainman et al., 2023). Confidence was calculated for both salinity and water levels (Hostetler et al., 2023) and combined to show overall confidence. The level of knowledge across the extended region is medium to low. The groundwater conceptualisations show the average value of the shallow groundwater, salinity and confidence over an area of 50 km along the cross section line.