Monitoring arrangements have been designed to allow for the establishment of water balance models at each farm dam location. A water balance can be conceptualised as follows:
Where the change in farm dam storage, , is governed by the volume of water entering the dam , and the volume leaving (. This can be further broken down into several key water balance components, where:
Monitoring will enable the direct measurement of rain (precipitation directly on the dam), an estimate of evaporation (from the water surface of the dam), an estimate of catchment inflows (volumes derived from the catchment), with any water consumed (by stock, domestic use or pumped in/out) needing to be estimated or measured elsewhere, and losses due to seepage and other unaccounted for volumes needing to be derived.