Engineering Commons^™

Solar & Rain Catching Canopy "Urban Oasis 2", Afolabi Ibitoye, Cheriyah Wilmot, Alexander Aptekar, Grzegorz Kosieradzki, Kaiyrgul Sultanova, Jude Vallon

Publications and Research

The accumulation of water runoff during rain storms is a major problem in New York City’s combination water systems, forcing water treatment plants to release untreated excess water. To avoid overfilling of the sewer system by this grey water, pocket parks and gardens will be used to absorb the excess rainfall. We will be harnessing nature’s resources with current technologies such as: solar panels combined with rain catching canopies, to beautify the environment, educate the public about sustainability, stimulate growth to local businesses through increased foot traffic and bringing social awareness on environmental issues.

The canopies are designed to collect …

An Overview Of Smartwater Management System: Strategic Potential In Bangladesh, Muhammad Qumrul Hassan, Mir F. Karim, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Jowaher Raza

Publications and Research

Water loss management is becoming an increasingly important as supplies are stressed by population growth or water scarcity. A SmartWater system ensures optimum consumption and prediction of future water use. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries due to global climate change considering its rapid urbanization, inequitable land use, low income and greater reliance on climate sensitive sectors, particularly agriculture. Agricultural lands used for cropping and livestock rearing are more susceptible to degradation than non-agricultural lands. Most farmers irrigate through flooding, losing up to 75% of water to evaporation and creating a substantial drawdown of much needed water for …

Season-Ahead Forecasting Of Water Storage And Irrigation Requirements – An Application To The Southwest Monsoon In India, Arun Ravindranath, Naresh Devineni, Upmanu Lall, Paulina Concha Larrauri

Publications and Research

Water risk management is a ubiquitous challenge faced by stakeholders in the water or agricultural sector. We present a methodological framework for forecasting water storage requirements and present an application of this methodology to risk assessment in India. The application focused on forecasting crop water stress for potatoes grown during the monsoon season in the Satara district of Maharashtra. Pre-season large-scale climate predictors used to forecast water stress were selected based on an exhaustive search method that evaluates for highest ranked probability skill score and lowest root-mean-squared error in a leave-one-out cross-validation mode. Adaptive forecasts were made in the years …

Recent Trends In The Frequency And Duration Of Global Floods, Nasser Najibi, Naresh Devineni

Publications and Research

Frequency and duration of floods are analyzed using the global flood database of the Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) to explore evidence of trends during 1985–2015 at global and latitudinal scales. Three classes of flood duration (i.e., short: 1–7, moderate: 8–20, and long: 21 days and above) are also considered for this analysis. The nonparametric Mann–Kendall trend analysis is used to evaluate three hypotheses addressing potential monotonic trends in the frequency of flood, moments of duration, and frequency of specific flood duration types. We also evaluated if trends could be related to large-scale atmospheric teleconnections using a generalized linear model framework. …

Solar And Rain Catching Canopy. Urban Oasis, Afolabi Ibitoye, Langston Clark, Elena Zimareva, Evan Banks, Alexander Aptekar

Publications and Research

The Urban Oasis is designed to work within existing “pocket parks” in New York City as a combined rainwater collector, personal electronics charging station and resting designation for New Yorkers. Intended to not only lessen the demand on the city power grid by using renewable energy to charge devices, the urban oasis is also intended to mitigate grey water overfill in New York’s combined sewer system and, in general, serve as a model for responsible environmental stewardship in urban areas.

The important technical aspects of the canopy specifically analyzed were:

a) how much rainwater could the canopy be expected to …

Bathymetry Data For Lakes Azuei And Enriquillo, Michael Piasecki, Mahrokh Moknatian

Publications and Research

This data set supports and forms the basis for the development of Digital Bathymetry Models (DBM) for Lakes Azuei (Haiti) and Enriquillo (Dominican Republic). Bathymetric Data is typically acquired using Sonar devices that measure the depth at specific points along a boat track and for which the longitude and latitude is recorded. From the resulting point cloud one develop a seamless representation of the floor of the lake on either a raster set (which is what we have done) or try to use a contour (vector representation) model in which the depth contours appear as polygons or -lines. The raw …

Computational Methods In Civil Engineering, Nir Krakauer

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.