Waranga Basin was holding only 58 per cent of capacity in July.
Several water storages, including the Goulburn River storages, are at a low point compared to previous years, but upcoming rain could breed more stability.
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As part of his presentation at the 2025 Irrigation Insights conference, Goulburn-Murray Water river operations manager Andrew Shields said storages were much lower than last year.
“With Dartmouth, and Hume, they’re both well down on where they were, this time last year,” Mr Shields said.
“In fact, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority has been transferring water from Dartmouth to Hume in recent months to start that process of moving water further downstream in case those dry conditions continue, otherwise they can’t transfer water from Dartmouth quick enough.”
Storage levels in Lake Eildon in July (blue line) compared to the last three years. Source: G-MW.
He said the Hume hit a low point of 22 per cent of capacity in May this year, now sitting at 43 per cent.
“The main reason for that was the low inflows that we had and the high demand,” he said.
“If we look at the rainfall from January to May across most of this corner of Australia, you look at the catchment areas, very much below average across those areas, and it doesn’t really bode well for wetting up the catchment heading into the winter and spring.
“Catchment is starting to wet up a little bit, and we are starting to see some response, but we’re not seeing those large inflows just at this stage the weather forecast for the next eight days (from July 22) is probably as promising as it’s been for a little while so, fingers crossed that turns into some run-off.”
Water storages' levels in both gigalitres and per cent of capacity in July 2024 and July 2025.
He ended his presentation with some positive news about the current weather outlooks.
“The more positive news that I wanted to share is that these outlooks have been consistent in, looking at that those above or chances of exceeding the median rainfall has been on the more positive side, than on the negative side,” Mr Shields said.
“If we look back to last year, we had a really dry year ... that had really high demands and utilise a lot of that water that was available.
“The recent rain that we’ve had, has been very welcome, and it is at the stage now where we are starting to see some response, but we still need that further rain to generate those inflows, and we really pick up most of that water through July to October ... so hopefully, we do see that rain.”
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