2020 is the year of many firsts, including the first online delivery of the Australian Delft-FEWS User Days. In 8 2-hour online webinars spread across 4 weeks, we could share 2 international keynotes, as well as 2 workshops and 18 presentations from our local Delft-FEWS community. The complete program and all presentations can be found at https://oss.deltares.nl/web/delft-fews/events.

The result was a very lively meeting with over 170 unique participants from more than 20 organisations, with up to 98 participants per session. This led to lots of interaction through the chat as well as Q&A in between the presentations. 6 people won a prize for Question of the Day, but we’re sure that the answers themselves were the real prizes to be had. The best presentations were determined by popular vote as was the Miss-FEWS pageant, which after 3 years has become a firm tradition down under.

After the User Days, 3 trainings were delivered virtually by the experts from Deltares. The interest was high, with 8 participants for the wflow   training (an open source fully distributed hydrology modelling platform, https://download.deltares.nl/en/download/wflow), 5 for the RTC-Tools 2 training (open source toolbox for control and optimization, https://www.deltares.nl/en/software/rtc-tools/#download) and 5 participants for the new (self-paced) Delft-FEWS basic config training.

We’re happy to announce that SunWater has again offered to host the Australia Delft-FEWS User Days in 2021, whether it will be organised in Brisbane or online. The 2021 User Days will be held in the period between mid April and late June.

Thank you all for your contributions to these 7th Australiasian Delft-FEWS User Days!