System identification of the upper part of Murray river

Data based modelling is an important tool for the efficient planning and management of river systems. In this paper models of the water level in the upper part of Murray River in Australia are derived from observed operational river data by system identification methods. We consider Prediction Error Method (PEM) and Subspace Identification Method (SIM) and present the system identification procedure from collecting prior physical knowledge to model validation. It is shown that first order models capture the main trends in the data and perform well on validation datasets from different years.