One of the most significant sources of water wastage in Australia is loss from small storage dams, either by seepage or evaporation. Over much of Australia, evaporative demand routinely exceeds precipitation. This paper outlines first, methodologies and measurement techniques to quantify the rate of evaporative loss from fresh water storages. These encompass high-accuracy water balance monitoring; determination of the validity of alternative estimation equations, in particular the FAO56 Penman Monteith ETo methodology; and the commencement of CFD modeling to determine a 'dam factor' in relation to practical atmospheric measurement techniques. Second, because the application of chemical monolayers is the only feasible alternative to the high cost of physically covering the storages to retard evaporation, the use of cetyl alcohol-based monolayers is reviewed, and preliminary research on their degradation by photolytic action, by wind break-up and by microbial degradation reported. Similarly, preliminary research on monolayer visualisation techniques for field application is reported; and potential enhancement of monolayers by other chemicals and attendant water quality issues are considered.

Colour (total anthocyanins) is one of a number of key quality indicators of red wine grapes. The colour of the final wine is largely determined by the presence of anthocyanins. Increasingly, the sale price of red winegrapes is based, in part, on measurements of the colour. Existing analytical methods for the measurement of grape composition can be expensive and/or time-consuming. This contribution reports on an optical fibre absorption measurement technique, known as optical fibre evanescent field absorption (FEFA), which has been evaluated for its potential to measure the colour of red winegrape homogenate samples. Grape samples, sourced from vineyards in the New England and Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, were used to evaluate the technique using low cost silica and plastic optical fibres.