Hydro Planner – a linked modelling system for water quantity and quality simulation of total water cycle

This paper describes a software tool called Hydro Planner, being developed as part of CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship Program. The main purpose of Hydro Planner is to enable urban water planners and managers to adopt a systems approach to obtain an improved understanding of how water, wastewater and stormwater systems interact with each other and with natural water systems in terms of water, contaminant and nutrient flows at city and regional scale. Hydro Planner can assist development of regional water allocation, river management, land development and urban water supply/demand strategies by allowing practitioners to assess implications of a variety of water management and land development options by considering the influence of factors such as climate change, population growth and technological changes. The aim of this paper is to describe conceptual design and implementation aspects of Hydro Planner.