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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Impacts Of Climate Changes On The Spatiotemporal Distribution Of Precipitation In The Western United States, Peng Jiang Dec 2013

Impacts Of Climate Changes On The Spatiotemporal Distribution Of Precipitation In The Western United States, Peng Jiang

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Precipitation in the Intermountain West is characterized by its great variability in both spatial and temporal distributions. Moreover, the spatiotemporal distribution of the precipitation is changing due to the climate changes. In this dissertation, three studies are conducted to investigate the multi-scale temporal variability of precipitation, the performance of current climate models on this variability, the influence of large-scale ocean oscillations on heavy precipitation, and the impact of human induced global warming on storm properties.

The first study is to examine the performance of current climate models on the simulation of the multi-scale temporal variability determined from the observed station …


Evaluating Predictability In The Community Earth System Model In Response To The Eruption Of Mount Pinatubo, Abigail Laurel Gaddis Aug 2013

Evaluating Predictability In The Community Earth System Model In Response To The Eruption Of Mount Pinatubo, Abigail Laurel Gaddis

Doctoral Dissertations

A central goal of climate research is to determine the perceptible effects of climate change on humans; in other words, the regional and decadal scale effects of carbon dioxide forcing. Identifying the most pronounced and long-lasting responses of climate variables to forcing is important for decadal prediction since forcing terms are a source of predictability on those time scales. Powerful volcanic eruptions provide a transient forcing on the climate system, creating a test bed for climate models. In this study, the Mount Pinatubo eruption is simulated in the Community Earth System Model, CESM1.0, for three model configurations: fully coupled T85 …


Climate Change Impact On The Spatio-Temporal Variability Of Hydro-Climate Extremes, Mohammad Reza Najafi Jun 2013

Climate Change Impact On The Spatio-Temporal Variability Of Hydro-Climate Extremes, Mohammad Reza Najafi

Dissertations and Theses

The rising temperature of the earth due to climate change has shown to alter the variations of hydro-climate variables, including their intensities, frequencies and durations. Extreme events such as floods are, in particular, susceptible to any disturbances in climate cycles. As such it is important to provide policymakers with sufficient knowledge about the probable impacts of climate change on hydrologic extremes and most importantly on floods, which have the highest impacts on the societies. For this reason analysis of hydro-climate extremes is commonly performed using data at each site (or grid cell), however due to the limited number of extreme …


Flexible Urban Water Distribution Systems, Seneshaw Amare Tsegaye Jan 2013

Flexible Urban Water Distribution Systems, Seneshaw Amare Tsegaye

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With increasing global change pressures such as urbanization and climate change, cities of the future will experience difficulties in efficiently managing scarcer and less reliable water resources. However, projections of future global change pressures are plagued with uncertainties. This increases the difficulty in developing urban water systems that are adaptable to future uncertainty.

A major component of an urban water system is the distribution system, which constitutes approximately 80-85% of the total cost of the water supply system (Swamee and Sharma, 2008). Traditionally, water distribution systems (WDS) are designed using deterministic assumptions of main model input variables such as water …