Digital Commons Network^™

Assessment Of Changes In Riverine Nitrate In The Sesan, Srepok And Sekong Tributaries Of The Lower Mekong River Basin, Chanta Oeurng, Thomas A. Cochrane, Mauricio E. Arias, Bikesh Shrestha, Thanapon Piman

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Changes in nitrates are of particular concern in tropical regions undergoing rapid development, as these changes may affect local and downstream riverine ecosystems. This study assessed the spatial and temporal differences in nitrate loads within the Sesan, Srepok, and Sekong (3S) Rivers, the largest tributaries of the Mekong River. Simulation results from a flow and nitrate calibrated SWAT model show large differences in year-to-year nitrate loads, a strong seasonality, and clear variability patterns in monthly nitrate loads in the 3S outlet during the wet season. The annual total nitrate loading from the 3S Rivers account for approximately 30% of the …

Overseas Chinese Environmental Engineers And Scientists Association (Oceesa) Report, Dec 2016., Yung-Tse Hung, Wen-Chi Ku, Lawrence K. Wang

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This Overseas Chinese Environmental Engineers and Scientists Association (OCEESA) report is 2016 Directory of Overseas Chinese Environmental Engineers and Scientists Association (OCEESA), Report number: OCEESA/JL-2016/33D1, December 2016, ISSN 1072 -7248. This report was prepared by Yung-Tse Hung, Permanent Executive Director, OCEESA. This report includes OCEESA contact information, list of OCEESA Directors, list of OCEESA past presidents, OCEESA membership data, constitutions and by laws of OCEESA (5 November 2000 edition), constitutions and by laws of OCEESA (14 February 2006 edition), constitutions and by laws of OCEESA (27 October 2013 edition), membership application form, letter from Wen-Chi Ku to confirm Yung-Tse Hung …

Ncer Assistance Agreement Annual Progress Report For Grant #83582401 - Assessment Of Stormwater Harvesting Via Manage Aquifer Recharge (Mar) To Develop New Water Supplies In The Arid West: The Salt Lake Valley Example, Ryan Dupont, Joan E. Mclean, Richard C. Peralta, Sarah E. Null, Douglas B. Jackson-Smith

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The aims of the original proposed project remain the same, that is, to test the hypothesis that Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) for stormwater harvesting is a technically feasible, socially and environmentally acceptable, economically viable, and permittable option for developing new water supplies for arid Western urban ecosystems experiencing increasing population, and climate change pressures on existing water resources. The project is being carried out via three distinct but integrated components that include: 1) Monitoring of existing distributed Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) harvesting schemes involving a growing number of demonstration Green Infrastructure (GI) test sites; 2) Integrated stormwater/vadose zone/groundwater/ ecosystem services …

Hydroshare – A Case Study Of The Application Of Modern Software Engineering To A Large Distributed Federally-Funded Scientific Software Development Project, Ray Idaszak, David G. Tarboton, Hong Yi, Laura Christopherson, Michael J. Stealey, Brian Miles, Pabitra Dash, Alva Couch, Calvin Spealman, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, Daniel P. Ames

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

HydroShare is an online collaborative system under development to support the open sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and computer models. With HydroShare, scientists can easily discover, access, and analyze hydrologic data and thereby enhance the production and reproducibility of hydrologic scientific results. HydroShare also takes advantage of emerging social media functionality to enable users to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. HydroShare is being developed by an interdisciplinary collaborative team of domain scientists, university software developers, and professional software engineers from ten institutions located across the United States. While the combination of non–co-located, diverse stakeholders …

Feasibility Study Of Land Cover Classification Based On Normalized Difference Vegetation Index For Landslide Risk Assessment, Thilanki Dahigamuwa, Qiuyan Yu, Manjriker Gunaratne

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Unfavorable land cover leads to excessive damage from landslides and other natural hazards, whereas the presence of vegetation is expected to mitigate rainfall-induced landslide potential. Hence, unexpected and rapid changes in land cover due to deforestation would be detrimental in landslide-prone areas. Also, vegetation cover is subject to phenological variations and therefore, timely classification of land cover is an essential step in effective evaluation of landslide hazard potential. The work presented here investigates methods that can be used for land cover classification based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), derived from up-to-date satellite images, and the feasibility of application …

Summer Ozone Concentrations In The Vicinity Of The Great Salt Lake, John Horel, Erik Crosman, Brian Blaylock, Seth Arens, Ansley Long, John Sohl, Randy S. Martin

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Residents near the Great Salt Lake in northern Utah, USA have been exposed to ozone levels during recent summers exceeding the current United States National Ambient Air Quality Standard. Accurately forecasting those exceedances has been difficult as a result of the complex meteorological and photochemical processes fostering them. To help improve such forecasts, a low-cost field study was conducted during summer 2015 to provide comprehensive observations of boundary-layer ozone concentrations in the context of the prevailing meteorological conditions. A network of surface ozone sensors was supplemented by sensors mounted on vehicles, a public transit light-rail car, news helicopter, tethered sonde, …

A Tool For Downscaling Weather Data From Large-Grid Reanalysis Products To Finer Spatial Scales For Distributed Hydrological Applications, Avirup Sen Gupta, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

A downscaling tool was developed to provide sub-daily high spatial resolution surfaces of weather variables for distributed hydrologic modeling from NASA Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications reanalysis products. The tool uses spatial interpolation and physically based relationships between the weather variables and elevation to provide inputs at the scale of a gridded hydrologic model, typically smaller (∼100 m) than the scale of weather reanalysis data (∼20–200 km). Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) measures greater than 0.70 were obtained for direct tests of downscaled daily temperature and monthly precipitation at 173 SNOTEL sites. In an integrated test driving the Utah Energy …

Modeling The Influence Of Various Water Stressors On Regional Water Supply Infrastructures And Their Embodied Energy, Weiwei Mo, Qiong Zhang

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Water supply consumes a substantial amount of energy directly and indirectly. This study aims to provide an enhanced understanding of the influence of water stressors on the embodied energy of water supply (EEWS). To achieve this goal, the EEWS in 75 North Carolina counties was estimated through an economic input-output based hybrid life cycle assessment. Ten water stressor indicators related to population, economic development, climate, water source, and land use were obtained for the 75 counties. A multivariate analysis was performed to understand the correlations between water stressor indicators and the EEWS. A regression analysis was then conducted to identify …

Google Flu Trends Spatial Variability Validated Against Emergency Department Influenza-Related Visits, Joseph Jeffrey Klembczyk, Mehdi Jalalpour, Scott Levin, Raynard E. Washington, Jesse M. Pines, Richard E. Rothman, Andrea Freyer Dugas

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Background: Influenza is a deadly and costly public health problem. Variations in its seasonal patterns cause dangerous surges in emergency department (ED) patient volume. Google Flu Trends (GFT) can provide faster influenza surveillance information than traditional CDC methods, potentially leading to improved public health preparedness. GFT has been found to correlate well with reported influenza and to improve influenza prediction models. However, previous validation studies have focused on isolated clinical locations.

Objective: The purpose of the study was to measure GFT surveillance effectiveness by correlating GFT with influenza-related ED visits in 19 US cities across seven influenza seasons, and to …

Estimation Of Surface Soil Moisture In Irrigated Lands By Assimilation Of Landsat Vegetation Indices, Surface Energy Balance Products, And Relevance Vector Machines, Alfonso F. Torres-Rua, Andres M. Ticlavilca, Roula Bachour, Mac Mckee

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Spatial surface soil moisture can be an important indicator of crop conditions on farmland, but its continuous estimation remains challenging due to coarse spatial and temporal resolution of existing remotely-sensed products. Furthermore, while preceding research on soil moisture using remote sensing (surface energy balance, weather parameters, and vegetation indices) has demonstrated a relationship between these factors and soil moisture, practical continuous spatial quantification of the latter is still unavailable for use in water and agricultural management. In this study, a methodology is presented to estimate volumetric surface soil moisture by statistical selection from potential predictors that include vegetation indices and …

Potential Effects Of Climate Change On Ecologically Relevant Streamflow Regimes, Sulochan Dhungel, David G. Tarboton, Jiming Jin, Charles P. Hawkins

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

We assessed the climate-driven changes in ecologically relevant flow regimes expected to occur by the year 2100 in streams across the conterminous United States. We used long-term daily flow measurements from 601 gauged streams whose watersheds were in relatively natural condition to characterize spatial variation in 16 flow regime variables selected for their ecological importance. Principal component analysis of these 16 variables produced five uncorrelated factors that described patterns of spatial covariation in flow regimes. These five factors were associated with low flow, magnitude, flashiness, timing, and constancy characteristics of the daily flow regime. We applied hierarchical clustering to the …

An Efficient Approach To Reliability-Based Topology Optimization For Continua Under Material Uncertainty, Mehdi Jalalpour, Mazdak Tootkaboni

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This contribution presents a computationally efficient method for reliability-based topology optimization for continuum domains under material properties uncertainty. Material Young’s modulus is assumed to be lognormally distributed and correlated within the domain. The computational efficiency is achieved through estimating the response statistics with stochastic perturbation of second order, using these statistics to fit an appropriate distribution that follows the empirical distribution of the response, and employing an efficient gradient-based optimizer. Two widely-studied topology optimization problems are examined and the changes in the optimized topology is discussed for various levels of target reliability and correlation strength. Accuracy of the proposed algorithm …

Planning For Climate Change: The Need For Mechanistic Systems-Based Approaches To Study Climate Change Impacts On Diarrheal Diseases, Jonathan E. Mellor, Karen Levy, Julie Zimmerman, Mark Elliott, Jamie Bartram, Elizabeth Carlton, Thomas Clasen, Rebecca Dilingham, Joseph Eisenberg, Richard Guerrant, Daniele Lantagne, James Mihelcic, Kara Nelson

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Increased precipitation and temperature variability as well as extreme events related to climate change are predicted to affect the availability and quality of water globally. Already heavily burdened with diarrheal diseases due to poor access to water, sanitation and hygiene facilities, communities throughout the developing world lack the adaptive capacity to sufficiently respond to the additional adversity caused by climate change. Studies suggest that diarrhea rates are positively correlated with increased temperature, and show a complex relationship with precipitation. Although climate change will likely increase rates of diarrheal diseases on average, there is a poor mechanistic understanding of the underlying …

Automatic Surface Crack Detection In Concrete Structures Using Otsu Thresholding And Morphological Operations, Sattar Dorafshan, Marc Maguire, Xiaojun Qi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Concrete cracking is a ubiquitous phenomenon, present in all types of concrete structures. Identifying and tracking the amount and severity of cracking is paramount to evaluating the current condition and predicting the future service life of a concrete asset. Concrete cracks can indicate reinforcement corrosion, the development of spalls or changing support conditions. Therefore, monitoring cracks during the life span of concrete structures has been an effective technique to evaluate the level of safety and preparing plans for future appropriate rehabilitation.

One growing technique are unmanned inspections using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). UAVs are drones equipped with cameras, sensors, GPS, …

Differences In Nutrient And Metal Uptake Among Plant Species In Stormwater Bioretention Systems., M. R. Borecki, Ryan Dupont, Joan E. Mclean

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Overview Of Current Applications, Challenges, And Future Trends In Distributed Process-Based Models In Hydrology, Simone Fatichi, Enrique R. Vivoni, Fred L. Ogden, Valeriy Y. Ivanov, Benjamin Mirus, David Gochis, Charles W. Downer, Matteo Camporese, Jason H. Davison, Brian Ebel, Norm Jones, Jongho Kim, Giuseppe Mascaro, Richard Niswonger, Pedro Restrepo, Riccardo Rigon, Chaopeng Shen, Mauro Sulis, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Process-based hydrological models have a long history dating back to the 1960s. Criticized by some as over-parameterized, overly complex, and difficult to use, a more nuanced view is that these tools are necessary in many situations and, in a certain class of problems, they are the most appropriate type of hydrological model. This is especially the case in situations where knowledge of flow paths or distributed state variables and/or preservation of physical constraints is important. Examples of this include: spatiotemporal variability of soil moisture, groundwater flow and runoff generation, sediment and contaminant transport, or when feedbacks among various Earth’s system …

Advancing Concrete Strength Prediction Using Non-Destructive Testing: Development And Verification Of A Generalizable Model, Kamran Amini, Mehdi Jalalpour, Norbert Delatte

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Accurate prediction of concrete compressive strength is imperative for investigating the in-situ concrete quality. To avoid destructive testing, developing reliable predictive models for concrete compressive strength using nondestructive tests (NDTs) is an active area of research. However, many of the developed models are dependent on calibration and/or concrete past history (e.g. mixture proportion, curing history, concrete mechanical properties, etc.), which reduces their utility for in-situ predictions.

This paper develops predictive models for concrete compressive strength that are independent of concrete past history. To this end, ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) and rebound hammer (RH) tests were performed on 84 concrete cylindrical …

Steam Girls Activities: Flandreau Indian School, Flandreau, Sd, 2016, Joanita M. Kant, Suzette R. Burckhard, Richard T. Meyers

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

This booklet includes tribally relevant, fun activities designed to increase interest in STEM studies and careers, particularly among Native American girls and women in South Dakota and the northern Great Plains. It is suitable for anyone to use in homes and schools, although adult supervision is recommended.

Shear Testing Of Precast Concrete Sandwich Wall Panel Composite Shear Connectors, Jaiden Olsen, Marc Maguire

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

As energy codes become more stringent, thermal efficiency of Precast Concrete Sandwich Panel Walls has become more important. This paper addresses the problem of predicting the behavior of full scale precast concrete sandwich panel walls, using data collected from small, inexpensive push-off specimens. Several fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) connectors being used today underwent shear testing performed on component scale push-off specimens. Each specimen contained several of the FRP connectors and the variables studied were wythe thickness, insulation type and insulation bond. A simplified beam spring model was created which uses beams to represent the concrete wythes and shear springs to …

Water Resources Systems Analysis: A Bright Past And A Challenging But Promising Future, David E. Rosenberg, Kaveh Madani

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Our field of water resources systems analysis is now experiencing one of its most exciting eras where scientists, decision makers, and funding agencies want to apply systems approaches to solve varied, complex, uncertain, and interdisciplinary resource management problems. Solving these problems presents great opportunities for us to engage in complex, real-world decision-making and make positive changes. However, to capitalize on these opportunities, we as a field must also overcome several large challenges related to problem identification, integration, blind use of systems tools, a focus on optimality, and harnessing big data. To overcome, we must look back to find what we …

Road Scholars For The Western States: Protecting Natural Areas By Improving Road Management Research, Brian Cooke, Charlie Luce, Tom Black, David G. Tarboton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

A poorly placed or unsuitably designed road can result in landslides, flooding, gullies, stream damage, and wildlife habitat destruction. Particularly in natural areas, benefits of roads, such as accessibility and convenience, must be weighed against potential water quality degradation, scenic and wildlife habitat destruction, and hazardous driving conditions.

Scientists at the Rocky Mountain Research Station helped create two free tools—GRAIP (Geomorphic Road Analysis and Inventory Package) and GRAIP-Lite—to help land managers make better decisions about road management in environmentally sensitive areas. GRAIP helps land managers analyze and predict surface erosion, gully risk, landslide risk, stream crossing failure risks, and other …

Development And Application Of Urban Landslide Vulnerability Assessment Methodology Reflecting Social And Economic Variables, Yoonkyung Park, Ananta Man Singh Pradhan, Ungtae Kim, Yun-Tae Kim, Sangdan Kim

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

An urban landslide vulnerability assessment methodology is proposed with major focus on considering urban social and economic aspects. The proposed methodology was developed based on the landslide susceptibility maps that Korean Forest Service utilizes to identify landslide source areas. Frist, debris flows are propagated to urban areas from such source areas by Flow-R (flow path assessment of gravitational hazards at a regional scale), and then urban vulnerability is assessed by two categories: physical and socioeconomic aspect. The physical vulnerability is related to buildings that can be impacted by a landslide event. This study considered two popular building structure types, reinforced-concrete …

Large Eddy Simulation Of Turbulence And Solute Transport In A Forested Headwater Stream, A. Khosronejad, A. T. Hansen, J. L. Kozarek, K. Guentzel, M. Hondzo, M. Guala, Peter Wilcock, J. C. Finlay, F. Sotiropoulos

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The large eddy simulation (LES) module of the Virtual StreamLab (VSL3D) model is applied to simulate the flow and transport of a conservative tracer in a headwater stream in Minnesota, located in the south Twin Cities metropolitan area. The detailed geometry of the stream reach, which is _135 m long, _2.5 m wide, and _0.15 m deep, was surveyed and used as input to the computational model. The detailed geometry and location of large woody debris and bed roughness elements up to _0.1 m in size were also surveyed and incorporated in the numerical simulation using the Curvilinear Immersed Boundary …

Comparison Of Selected Differential Producing, Ultrasonic And Magnetic Flow Meters, Johnny B. Prettyman, Michael C. Johnson, Steven L. Barfuss

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Selecting the best flow meter for a specific application can be challenging because of the many types and designs of flow meters, with each having its own merits and drawbacks. Illustrating these specific benefits and drawbacks can help the buyer select the meter best suited for the desired application. The flow meters investigated in this research include five designs of differential-pressure meters (i.e., differential-producing), a magnetic flow meter, and an ultrasonic flow meter. The differential meters included the Venturi designs, the wedge flow meter, and the V-cone meter. Testing was completed at the Utah Water Research Laboratory to quantify the …