Water management flawed owing to vastly underestimated drought risk, study finds

Thousand-year rainfall record shows weather in New South Wales over the past 100 years has been unusually stable and absent of mega droughts

Drought and flood risk in New South Wales is vastly underestimated, with weather in the past 100 years being unusually stable, according to a detailed reconstruction of rainfall over a NSW catchment for the past 1,000 years.

In a world first, scientists have used data drawn from an ice core to reconstruct the rainfall records for a particular catchment - in this case one in the Hunter Valley called the Williams river. Over the past 1,000 years they found droughts such as the millennial drought or worse occurred quite frequently, as did periods of very wet weather.