Billions of litres of water vanishes from Australia's most vital river network

The water is being stolen, or the water never existed anyway. Water allocations are based on a single year which had high rainfall. Models attempting to predict rainfall are problematic, and models attempting to predict available water following measured rainfall are confounded by over-extraction (ie: water theft).

Water theft is being made increasingly easier by reducing the funding available for policing the regulations.

If you want a summary of the political situation around water rights in Australia just search for "Angus Taylor water rights" or "Barnaby Joyce water rights". Our government is openly corrupt and they make no attempt to conceal it.

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-03/the-mystery-of-the... instead of

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/?pfmredir=sm

Would it be possible to detect water theft from satellite imagery?

I don't know enough about any of this, but besides the obvious difficulty (trying to measure a 3D object with 2D imagery), water flow in Australia is inconsistent at best. I don't even know what kind of historical data we have available.

Anyone interested? My email is in my bio

Severe Bushfires season in 2019. "Where is our water?" in 2020

Your water is in the ocean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus...