Engineering Commons^™

Computational Modeling For Decision-Making Under Climate Change Uncertainty: Reservoir Simulation Game, Julianne Quinn

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Almost every decision you make is under uncertainty. Will I need a rain jacket in the afternoon? Will they say yes if I ask them out? Is 1 hour enough time to finish this assignment? Oftentimes, we can use computational modeling to simulate different scenarios of what might happen in the future to inform what decisions are best on average, or what decisions minimize the worst case outcome. For example, you could decide what player to draft for your Fantasy Football team by simulating player performance. In this activity, we will simulate how much water to release from a dam …

Water Resources International Development: What On Earth Are We Doing?, Patrick Ray

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Large agencies such as the World Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the United Nations, regional development banks (such as the Asian Development Bank), and philanthropic organizations (such as the Rockefeller Foundation) are actively engaged in water resources development in low-income countries. Why? And what metrics do they use to decide if the investments of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in water infrastructure projects are justified? And what accommodations do they tend to make for risks such as climate change? And what attention do they tend to give to questions of equity? I probably have no idea. But I’ve …

Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Marjolijn Haasnoot

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• Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP) is a decision making approach that explicitly includes decision making over time. The essence is proactive and dynamic planning in response to how the future actually unfolds.
• DAPP explores alternative sequences of decisions (adaptation pathways) for multiple futures and illuminates the path dependency of alternative strategies. It opens the decision space and helps to overcome policy paralysis due to deep uncertainty. There are different routes that can achieve the objectives under changing conditions (like ‘different roads leading to Rome’).
• Policy actions have an uncertain design life and might fail sooner or later to continue achieving …

Adaptive Water Infrastructure Planning For A Changing World, Sarah Fletcher

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Water planners face the challenge of ensuring reliable water supply for people and the environment. Long-term changes and short-term variability in both the natural and social environments create large uncertainty in future water supply and demand. This makes it difficult to know when and how to adapt water systems through operational changes, policy, and infrastructure development. Adaptive planning approaches, in which planners defer action and respond as the system changes over time, have the potential to enable robustness to an uncertain future without unnecessary infrastructure development or policy changes. However, adaptive approaches may prevent planners from leveraging economies of scale, …

Adaptive Policy Design In Water Resources Systems Under Uncertain Climate And Human Stressors, Jon Herman

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Long-term planning of water resources systems must contend with severe uncertainty in future projections of hydroclimatic variability across multiple scales, as well as uncertainty in human behavior, such as land use and reservoir operation. This talk will review recent developments in adaptive policy design to meet this challenge, centered around the key question: how should we learn from, and react to, dynamic observations of hydroclimatic, human, and ecological variables to ensure long-term sustainability? Specific contributions will cover three areas: (1) adaptation of short-term control rules, enabling existing infrastructure to manage multiple objectives across a range of possible futures; (2) exploration …

Strategies For Managing The Colorado River In An Uncertain Future, Jian Wang

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Colorado River managers face a deeply uncertain future. Projections of declining watershed runoff are likely to necessitate restructuring of the present interpretation of the Law of the River that allocates water supply among Mexico and the seven states of the Basin. Additionally, the magnitude and distribution of consumptive uses of water will change. Outcomes for river and reservoir ecosystems are poorly predicted. How should we make better decisions given these uncertain factors? To help answer this question and expand conversation about the Colorado River management issues, we (1) classify different levels of uncertainty to guide decisions about which modeling tools …

Developing Open Source Software Using Version Control Systems: An Introduction To The Git Language For Documenting Your Computational Research, Jared D. Smith, Jonathan D. Herman

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Version control systems track the history of code as it is committed (saved) by any number of developers. Have you made a coding error and cannot debug it? Version control systems allow for resetting code back to when it worked, and show what code has changed since previous commits.

The contents of this lecture provide an introduction to the git version control language, GitHub for cloud hosting open source code repositories, and tutorials that demonstrate common and useful git and GitHub practices. This lecture is intended to be coupled with a discussion on creating reproducible computational research.

The zipped folder …

Lecture Notes: Multi-Objective Optimization, Lina Sela

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No abstract provided.

Lecture Notes: Nonlinear Optimization And Matlab Optimization Toolbox Example, Lina Sela

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No abstract provided.

Video Conversations - The Future Of The Colorado River, John C. Schmidt, David E. Rosenberg

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This video series explores key Colorado River management issues with key managers across the basin. Video discussions in the table on the next page are presented in the order they were recorded. Topics include river ecosystems, California, Upper Basin, Tribal, and Federal perspectives, as well as future hydrology and climate. Each video runs for 60 to 90 minutes. Speakers start by describing how they got to the place they are professionally. There are prepared remarks and questions and answers from participants who attended at the time the video was recorded. Links to suggested readings are provided. Click the VIDEO url …

Example Take-Home Final Exam Questions From Cee 433: Water Technology & Policy At The University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Ashlynn Stillwell

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The following example questions were part of take-home final exams spanning 2014-2020 in CEE 433: Water Technology & Policy, taught by Dr. Ashlynn S. Stillwell at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These questions were part of the take-home final exam, with additional questions not reported here.

Ce 5500: Stochastic Hydrology, University Of Virginia, Julianne Quinn

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This document is the syllabus for CE 5500: Stochastic Hydrology by instructor Julianne D. Quinn at the University of Virginia. The course is an elective class, open to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students.

Lecture 1: Stochastic Hydrology, Julianne Quinn

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This is the first lecture of CE 5500: Stochastic Hydrology, taught by Julianne Quinn at the University of Virginia.

Causal Loop Development Activity, Ali Mirchi

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Students will work in groups to develop a causal loop diagram (CLD) to illustrate the structure and expected behavior of the fictional water short state of Nevizonato facilitate qualitative discussion of expected outcomes of a proposed water management strategy. This activity requires familiarity with systems thinking and system dynamics modeling. CLDs are introduced as a fundamental systems thinking tool for conceptual modeling.

Irrigania Game Activity - Ii, Kaveh Madani

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Directed class activity for students to play the Irrigania Game by Seibert and Vis (2012). Students choose to irrigate fields each year (round) with rainwater, surface water, or groundwater to maximize profit. Six different games are described.

Game 1

• Objective: Maximize your individual rank (profit) in class

• Rules: 1) No communication between you and any other farmer, 2) Precipitation = Normal (P=1), 3) Number of years (rounds) = 15.

Game 2

• Objective: Maximize your individual rank (profit) in class
• Rules: 1) No communication constraints, 2) Precipitation = Normal (P=1), 3), Number of years (rounds) = 15.

Game 3

• Objective: Maximize …

Value Of Water - Economic And Full Value - Michigan Tech University, Rabi Gyawali, Ali Mirchi, David Watkins

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Lecture module on Economic and Full Value of water developed by Michigan Tech University (slides).

Lecture draws on two readings:

1. Brett Walton. (2010). The Price of Water: A Comparison of Water Rates, Usage in 30 U.S. Cities. April 26. Circle of Blue WaterNews. Available at: https://www.circleofblue.org/2010/world/the-price-of-water-a-comparison-of-water-rates-usage-in-30-u-s-cities/.
2. Peter Rogers, Radhika de Silva, Ramesh Bhatia. (2002) Water is an economic good: How to use prices to promote equity, efficiency, and sustainability, Water Policy, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1366-7017(02)00004-1.

Find a companion Jeopardy game -- test your knowledge about the readings, prices, economic values, full values, and more -- under …

Cee 433: Water Technology & Policy Syllabus, University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Ashlynn Stillwell

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This document is the syllabus for CEE 433: Water Technology & Policy, by instructor Ashlynn S. Stillwell at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The course is an elective class, open to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students.

Jeopardy - Water Price, Ecnomic Cost, Economic Value, Rabi Gyawali, Ali Mirchi, David Watkins, Jr.

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It's Jeopardy! Test your knowledge of water prices, water cost, it's economic value, full value, and more. Information developed from a companion lecture and two readings:

1. Brett Walton. (2010). The Price of Water: A Comparison of Water Rates, Usage in 30 U.S. Cities. April 26. Circle of Blue WaterNews. Available at: https://www.circleofblue.org/2010/world/the-price-of-water-a-comparison-of-water-rates-usage-in-30-u-s-cities/.
2. Peter Rogers, Radhika de Silva, Ramesh Bhatia. (2002) Water is an economic good: How to use prices to promote equity, efficiency, and sustainability, Water Policy, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-17, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1366-7017(02)00004-1.

How many Jeopardy points can you earn?

Milwaukee Wet Weather Flow Management System Planning, David Watkins

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Many older cities across the United States rely on combined sewers to convey both stormwater runoff and sanitary sewage. Combined sewer overflows (CSOs), containing untreated sewage, occur during extreme wet weather, when the capacity of these combined sewer systems is exceeded. Across the U.S., CSOs pose a serious threat to water quality in thousands of lake, river, and coastal ecosystems. In addition to harming the natural environment, they may be a threat to human health and have adverse economic consequences (e.g., beach closings, reduced aesthetics, tourism impacts).

In this assignment, students role-play engineering consultants tasked with developing a cost-effective plan …

Water Resource Systems And Management (Spring 2017) - University Of Colorado Boulder, Joseph Kasprzyk

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No abstract provided.

Introduction To Reservoir Analysis - University Of Colorado Boulder, Joseph Kasprzyk

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Introduction to reservoirs, lecture from Water Resource Systems and Management (Spring 2017), University of Colorado Boulder. By Joseph Kasprzyk. Learning goals include (i) introducing what a reservoir is, (ii) apply control volume and conservation of mass principles to analyze storage in natural lakes and reservoirs (iii) calculate required storage size for reservoirs using basic techniques (iv) define reservoir terms including safe yield and critical period (v) discuss dam building trends in the US and globally.

Case Study For Guided Project In Stochastic Hydrology, Meghna Babbar-Sebens

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Attached are two guided project activities for hydrology and climate data of Eagle Creek Watershed, Indiana, USA. The zip files have flow and precipitation datasets at daily, monthly, and annual time scales.

Gams Handout 2, Ethan Yang

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No abstract provided.

Exercise - Choose A Manager To Learn Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis - University Of Colorado Boulder, Joseph Kasprzyk

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A prompt for an in-class exercise, so that students can learn basic principles of multi-criteria decision analysis. The ideal place for this exercise is to have it before the formal lecture of multi-criteria decision analysis. The students will start to gain an intuitive understanding of how to transform preferences to scores, how to weight the metrics, and how to make a final decision.

Exercise - Calculate Reservoir Performance Metrics - University Of Colorado Boulder, Joseph Kasprzyk

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No abstract provided.

Introduction To Water Resources Systems - University Of Colorado Boulder, Joseph Kasprzyk

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This is the introductory lecture to a Water Resource Systems and Management class from Spring 2017 at the University of Colorado Boulder, by Joseph Kasprzyk. Learning goals include (i) defining integrated water resources management, (ii) identifying Colorado water management issues (ii) identifying how RiverWare simulation and optimization can be used to develop water plans (iii) use the HyMod model to perform rainfall-runoff modeling (iv) generating random parameter samples and understanding how parameter uncertainty affects model results.

Stochastic Hydrology, Meghna Babbar-Sebens

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Syllabus for graduate class in Stochastic Hydrology

Optimization In Water Resources Engineering, Meghna Babbar-Sebens

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No abstract provided.

Gams Handout 4, Ethan Yang

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No abstract provided.

Gams Handout 1, Ethan Yang

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No abstract provided.