Environmental Engineering Commons^™

A Validated Tropical-Extratropical Flood Hazard Assessment For New York Harbor, Philip M. Orton, T. M. Hall, Stefan A. Talke, Alan F. Blumberg, Nickitas Georgas, S. Vinogradov

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent studies of flood risk at New York Harbor (NYH) have shown disparate results for the 100 year storm tide, providing an uncertain foundation for the flood mitigation response after Hurricane Sandy. Here we present a flood hazard assessment that improves confidence in our understanding of the region's present-day potential for flooding, by separately including the contribution of tropical cyclones (TCs) and extratropical cyclones (ETCs), and validating our modeling study at multiple stages against historical observations. The TC assessment is based on a climatology of 606 synthetic storms developed from a statistical-stochastic model of North Atlantic TCs. The ETC assessment …

Hydraulic And Hydrologic Properties Of The Sabine River, Annie L. Bryant

Civil Engineering Theses

The Sabine River is located in Northeast Texas and is home to many threatened and endangered species as well as a growing human population. It is important to understand channel properties and flow characteristics of rivers in order better manage these important natural resources. The Sabine was monitored for hydraulic and hydrological properties as this is a poorly understood river at this point in time.

Hydraulic modeling was conducted to determine channel velocities and shear stresses during different storm frequencies. It was found that velocity and shear stress had a direct relationship at lower velocities. A comparison of existing Geographic …

Lucidpipe™ Power System, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets

In most gravity fed water transmission pipelines, it is desired to reduce excess pressure head to prevent undue strain on a pipeline and lower the incidence of leaks. Normally this is done with pressure reducing valves that essentially burn off this excess pressure as heat. The LucidPipe™ system converts it to low cost electricity thereby removing unwanted pressure and generating energy at the same time - energy that can be put used behind the grid or put back on the grid. The LucidPipe™ system extracts a small percentage of pressure head providing nearly invisible operation allowing water operators to fulfill …

Occurrence And Proliferation Of Antibiotics And Antibiotic Resistance In Wastewater Treatment Plants, Majid Neyestani

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Solids retention time (SRT) is one of the most important factors in designing and operating activated sludge systems for biological wastewater treatment. Longer SRTs have been shown to alter the structure and function of microbial communities, thereby leading to improved treatment efficacy with respect to bulk and trace organics, nutrient removal, and membrane fouling. However, research has also shown that longer SRTs lead to increased prevalence of antibiotic resistant bacteria, perhaps due to increased exposure to antibiotics present in influent wastewater. The purpose of this study was to characterize changes in microbial community structure in a laboratory-scale activated sludge system …

Proactive Assessment Of Climate Change And Contaminant Spill Impacts On Source Water Quality, Lillian C. Jeznach

Doctoral Dissertations

Managing the water quality of surface drinking water sources has become an increasingly difficult task for water suppliers due to increased watershed urbanization and climate change. Changes in source water quality may affect public perceptions, treatment effectiveness, and ultimately costs to treat water to drinking standards. Although there are increased threats to current and future drinking water quality, current approaches to managing these threats are typically reactionary. Prior detailed modeling efforts of hypothetical events that may impair raw water quality allow for an understanding of constituent fate and transport, including potential maximum concentrations and travel times to the drinking water …

Water Quality Modelling Using Multivariate Statistical Analysis And Remote Sensing In South Florida, Mohammad Hajigholizadeh

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The overall objective of this dissertation research is to understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of water quality parameters in different water bodies of South Florida. Two major approaches (multivariate statistical techniques and remote sensing) were used in this study. Multivariate statistical techniques include cluster analysis (CA), principal component analysis (PCA), factor analysis (FA), discriminant analysis (DA), absolute principal component score-multiple linear regression (APCS-MLR) and PMF receptor modeling techniques were used to assess the water quality and identify and quantify the potential pollution sources affecting the water quality of three major rivers of South Florida. For this purpose, a 15-year (2000–2014) data …

Data Provisioning For The Object Modeling System (Oms), Jack R. Carlson, Olaf David, Wes J. Lloyd, George H. Leavesley, Ken W. Rojas, Timothy R. Green, Mazdak Arabi, Lucas Yaege, Hom Kipka

Wes Lloyd

The Object Modelling System (OMS) platform supports initiatives to build or re-factor agro-environmental models and deploy them in different business contexts as model services on cloud computing platforms. Whether traditional desktop, client-server, or emerging cloud deployments, success especially at the enterprise level relies on stable and efficient data provisioning to the models. In this paper we describe recent experience and trends with tools and services deployed to cloud platforms. Also, systematic, sustained data stewardship and alignment with standards organizations impart stability to data provisioning efforts.

The Virtual Machine (Vm) Scaler: An Infrastructure Manager Supporting Environmental Modeling On Iaas Clouds, Wes J. Lloyd, Olaf David, Mazdak Arabi, James C. Ascough Ii, Timothy R. Green, Jack R. Carlson, Ken W. Rojas

Wes Lloyd

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds provide a new medium for deployment of environmental modeling applications. Harnessing advancements in virtualization, IaaS clouds can provide dynamic scalable infrastructure to better support scientific modeling computational demands. Providing scientific modeling “as-a-service” requires dynamic scaling of server infrastructure to adapt to changing user workloads. This paper presents the Virtual Machine (VM) Scaler, an autonomic resource manager for IaaS Clouds. We have developed VM-Scaler, a REST/JSON-based web services application which supports infrastructure provisioning and management to support scientific modeling for the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP) [Lloyd et al. 2012]. VM-Scaler harnesses the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) …

Reflecting Societal Values In Designing Flood Risk Management Strategies, Mark Adamson, John O'Sullivan, Zeinab Bedri

Conference papers

In 2006, the Office of Public Works (OPW) began the National Catchment-based Flood Risk Assessment and Management (CFRAM) Programme through a series of pilot studies. A Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) Framework was developed through the pilot studies that integrated a number of objectives related to a wide range of potential impacts and benefits into the core of process of appraising and selecting suitable flood risk management measures for a given area or location, and then for prioritising national investments for different schemes and projects. This MCA Framework, that provides a systematic process of developing a non-monetised but numerical indicator of benefit …

Pyrolysis Of Dried Wastewater Biosolids Can Be Energy Positive, Patrick J. Mcnamara, Jon Koch, Zhongzhe Liu, Daniel Zitomer

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Pyrolysis is a thermal process that converts biosolids into biochar (a soil amendment), py-oil and py-gas, which can be energy sources. The objectives of this research were to determine the product yield of dried biosolids during pyrolysis and the energy requirements of pyrolysis. Bench-scale experiments revealed that temperature increases up to 500 °C substantially decreased the fraction of biochar and increased the fraction of py-oil. Py-gas yield increased above 500 °C. The energy required for pyrolysis was approximately 5-fold less than the energy required to dry biosolids (depending on biosolids moisture content), indicating that, if a utility already uses energy …

Automated Control Flaw Generation Procedure: Cheakamus Dam Case Study, Bogdan Pavlovic

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis deals with the problem of aging hydropower infrastructure systems and system components, a problem that is very common across Canada. Flaws of common risk analysis methods are noted, and the need for new risk analysis approaches is identified. System dynamics simulation method is introduced as an implementation mechanism for the System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). STPA and its adaptation to complex hydropower systems are explained thoroughly. Fuzzy logic is used to model operator’s decision making. The main objectives of the research include the development of an automated generic approach that implements STPA and fuzzy logic for the investigation …

Modelling Of Dreissenid Mussel Impacts On Lake Michigan, Chunqi Shen

Theses and Dissertations

Invasive dreissenid mussel appear to have profoundly altered Great Lakes food webs and nutrient cycles during the past several decades. Recent declines of phytoplankton were supposed to be highly related with the increase of mussel population. These phytoplankton declines were further found to be coincident with declines in the abundance of planktivorous fish. In addition, the resurgence of Cladophora in Great lakes was estimated to be associated with the high density colonization of mussels. More light is available at lake bottom due to the mussels’ graze effect. The mussels further promote Cladophora growth by fertilizing it with nutrient-rich excrement. And …

Development And Assessment Of A Groundwater Sustainability Index In Climatically Diverse Groundwater Irrigated Regions In Nebraska, Maria A. Mulet Jalil

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The aim of this research was to evaluate the impact of regional change in ET on groundwater level changes and the assessment and development of a groundwater sustainability index for climatically diverse regions across Nebraska during 2000-2014. Irrigation in the selected regions is predominantly supplied by groundwater. The hypothesis is that groundwater use can become sustainable if the regional evapotranspiration (ET) is managed so that it equals the ET of vegetation that is native to the region. Site locations were Box Butte, Chase, Dundy, Holt LNNRD and York Counties and 3 ecosystems were evaluated: native vegetation, dryland and irrigated cropping …

Fire-Spotting Modelling And Parametrisation For Wild-Land Fires, Inderpreet Kaur, Gianni Pagnini

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This article describes a mathematical formulation for simulating the effects of firebrands on the propagation of the wild-land fires. Among the different approaches available in literature, this formulation is defined in a way to provide a versatile approach for application to operational wildfire models. Most of the operational wildfire models like WRF-SFIRE and ForeFire model only the evolution of the fire-line according to the definition of the rate of spread, fuel characterisation and the average fire properties and concurrent atmospheric conditions. But this information is not enough to simulate the effects of turbulence and fire-spotting. The formulation presented here can …

A Generator Of Landuse Application For Complex And Heterogeneous Agricultural Practices, Odile Leccia-Phelpin, Jean-Marie Lescot, Françoise Vernier

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Non-point source pollution from agriculture has become a major concern for water managers and institutional stakeholders. To reduce diffuse pollution, agricultural conservation measures are widely used with efficiency. On non-monitored territories environmental modelling enables the assessment of their long term impacts on water and soils and to evaluate land-use change scenarios. We developed an innovative Generator of Landuse (GenLU) application in order to build up multi-year spatial crop successions from identified crop rotations with their related management schedule s. GenLU can be used solely for generating landuse or coupled with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model so as …

Water Supply System Classification For Water Quality Improvement, Bruno Melo Brentan, Gustavo Meirelles Lima, Edevar Luvizotto Junior, Joaquín Izquierdo, Rafael Pérez-García

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Universal access to drinkable water is a constitutional right guaranteed in Brazil. However, not all cities in this country are able to supply the population with the expected quality. Important actions should be taken to improve the supply of drinkable water. To define a strategic plan for this purpose, classification tools can facilitate the design of plans, by grouping cities with similar quality conditions. During the last decades, neural network approaches have been used in environmental models, allowing more accurate representation of some complex systems. This work proposes the use of self-organizing maps (SOM’s) coupled with the k-means algorithm …

Optimal Land Use?! – A Review On Optimization Techniques Used In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Andrea Kaim, Anna Cord, Martin Volk

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Agriculture, forest management, conservation planning and other related disciplines have specific land use demands, and thus different perspectives on how land should be used in an “optimal way”. One way to solve arising land use conflicts is employing the ecosystem services concept together with methods from the field of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). Especially optimization techniques provide the possibility to include socio-economic and ecological aspects as well as the protection of biodiversity. In this study, we give an overview of these methods, focusing especially on their application in agricultural areas. We explore their abilities for the identification of ecosystem service …

Data-Driven Wildfire Behaviour Modelling: Application Of Firefly To Field-Scale Grassland Controlled Burns, M. C. Rochoux, C. Zhang, D. Lucor, S. Ricci, A. Trouve

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Assessing epistemic uncertainties is now considered as a milestone for improving numerical predictions of a dynamically evolving system. The objective of this project is to demonstrate the benefits of data assimilation combined with sensor observations of the fire front position to both quantify and reduce the uncertainties in wildfire behaviour forecasting capability. The challenges found on the route to modelling wildfire behaviour are two-fold. There is the modelling challenge associated with providing accurate representations of the multi-scale multi-physics processes governing wildfire dynamics. There is also the data challenge associated with providing accurate estimates of the environmental conditions (biomass moisture, near-surface …

Atlas: A Tool To Model Spatial-Temporal Dynamics Of Processes Influencing Ecosystem Services, Hugo Thierry, Aude Vialatte, Claude Monteil, Annie Ouin

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Biodiversity provides various benefits to humankind throughout what is defined as ecosystem services. Within a specific ecosystem, a wide range of ecosystem services can be identified. During the past decades, human intervention has aimed to increase some services such as food production through agricultural intensification, at the expense of other services such as water regulation. Mapping, evaluating and quantifying each of these ecosystem services provided by biodiversity to crop production could help to increase the multi-functionality of agricultural landscapes. In this context, we developed a spatially-explicit model called ATLAS (AgriculTural LandscApe Simulator). ATLA …

Understanding The Relationships Between Sanitation And Health In Nicaragua And Honduras, Through Data Mining Tools, Ginevra Marina Lazerini, Josep Nualart, Sergio Ruiz-Cayuela, Maialen Urbina, Miquel Sànchez Marrè, Karina Gibert

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The aim of this work is to analyze water and sanitation supply data from Nicaragua and Honduras by using different data mining tools. The data has been provided by SIASAR (Rural Water and Sanitation Information System), which is a water and sanitation management and information platform created through the joint effort of different Central American Governments and the World Bank. In the study data from a survey performed in all the rural communities in Nicaragua and in a sample of the rural communities in Honduras from 2012 to 2015 is analyzed. Database contains 10206 communities described by 23 numerical variables …

Resilience Of Punta S’Aliga Barrier Beach To Storm Impacts, Andrea Sulis

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Beach and dune provide natural defense against erosion and flooding, and associated mitigation measures are classical coastal engineering problems studied by many researchers. Winter storms cause severe erosion leading to dune breaching and then flooding of the hinterland areas. Resiliency of a barrier beach depends on the ability of the dune (resistor) to recover in height and extent following storms. Whereas erosion of the beach and dune occurs over hours and days, it can be years to decades before the beach and dune are able to recover to their pre-storm state. In the last two decades, numerical modelling methods have …

The Economics Of Agricultural Water Productivity In The Blue Nile, Imeshi Weerasinghe, James Booker, Wim Bastiaanssen, Lisa-Marie Rebelo, Ann Van Griensven

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Agricultural Water Productivity (AWP) is often simplified as the ‘crop per drop’, described as the output in terms of yield or biomass per unit of water input. This purely physical measure of Water Productivity (WP) using only a single factor input (water) does not consider: (1) the level of other inputs used in conjunction with water, (2) the opportunity cost of water as an input, (3) the value of the output and (4) the costs of production for different crops. This study presents a justification and methodology for incorporating these factors into WP indicators. The application of these extensions to …

E3.Pt – An E3 Portabledyme Model For Portugal, Anett Großmann, Frank Hohmann

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

E3 models are environmentally extended economic models. They are extensively used for impact assessment of energy, climate and resource policies at national and international level. E3 models have proven to be suitable tools for quantifying effects on the economy, environment and energy system. Usually, the structure and documentation of such models are only accessible by the model builders. They are facing the allegation to be a "black box" meaning that only their creators are able to operate and fully understand the model system. Decision makers are often only engaged at the end of the model building process to discuss the …

A Markov Decision Process Model To Compare Ecosystem Services Provided By Agricultural Landscapes, Sabrina Gaba, Nathalie Peyrard, Régis Sabbadin, Julia Radoszyckic

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

One current challenge in managing agricultural landscapes, is to reach a trade-off between provision of food and biodiversity conservation. Two extreme land-use strategies, land sharing and land sparing, are often discussed. The design of decision rules for allocating crops and lands for biodiversity conservation (e.g. grasslands) can be formalized as an optimization problem. However the target to optimize, representing the trade-off between ecosystem services (ES) can be complex to model since ES are usually not defined on comparable scales and may rely on different sides of biodiversity. Here, we will investigate how landscape composition and structure affect the magnitude of …

Sectorization Of Intermittent Water Supply Networks Based On Graph Theory And Clustering Techniques, Amilkar E. Ilaya-Ayza, David Ayala-Cabrera, Joaquín Izquierdo, Enrique Campbell, Rafael Pérez-García

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Intermittent water supply is the form of access to water in many countries around the world. It is very common that design, operation, maintenance and, in general, decision-making in these systems are performed using tools originally developed for systems with continuous supply, which are not adequate. However, these tools can be reasonably applied to network sectorization of intermittent supply networks. We propose a sectorization methodology for networks that do not have the possibility of working with continuous supply. In addition, to ensure sufficient pressure, sector design must guarantee equity in the supply. Furthermore, it is not enough to establish sector …

A Mathematical Model For Ghg From Sb-Mbr: Calibration By An Innovative Protocol, Giorgio Mannina, Alida Cosenza

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

A mathematical model to quantify greenhouse gases (GHG) (carbon dioxide, CO₂ and nitrous oxide, N₂O) for a membrane bioreactor (MBR) is presented. The model has been applied to a pilot plant with a pre-denitrification MBR scheme. The pilot plant was cyclically filled with real saline wastewater according to the fill-draw-batch operation. The model was calibrated by adopting a specific protocol based on extensive field dataset. Standardised Regression Coefficient (SRC) method was adopted to select the most influential model factors to be calibrated. Results related to SRC method show that among the important model factors a key role …

A Framework For Decision-Making In Cases Of Invasive Species, Peter A. Khaiter, Marina G. Erechtchoukova, Sina Roushan

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Invasion of nonindigenous species is one of the most pressing global challenges, causing substantial environmental, economic and social harm. Invasion of alien species alters the composition, structure and functioning of invaded ecosystems as well as the services they generated before the invasion. Decisions about the management of invasive cases are inherently difficult because of the multifactorial and multiattribute scope of the problem. In particular, the resilience limits of invaded ecosystems to fully recover original, pre-invaded states remain unclear. To facilitate management efforts, decision-makers and environmental practitioners require a framework integrating relevant knowledge and acting as a supporting expert system. The …

Cool Farm Tool (Cft) Water: Novel Tool For Water Resource Assessment On Field Scale, Benjamin Kayatz, Gabriele Baroni, Benjamin Kuster, Stefan Lüdtke, Daniella Malin, Richard Heathcote, Carl Von Tonder, Martin Wattenbach

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

At the global scale over 70 % of all fresh water used is consumed by the agricultural sector. For this reason a sustainable water management at the basin level often requires the assessment of water that is used for crop production. In this context, the characterization of green and blue water footprint showed to be a useful and efficient approach to support analysis and decisions.

However determining the water footprint is cumbersome and often linked to additional data acquisition efforts. Furthermore the water footprint is often not revealing the basin impact of crop production. To overcome these limitations we developed …

Metadata For Describing Water Models, Mohamed M. Morsy, Jonathan L. Goodall, Christina Bandaragoda, Anthony M. Castronova, Jane Greenberg

Anthony Castronova

Computer models are widely used in hydrology and water resources management. A large variety of models exist, each tailored to address specific challenges related to hydrologic science and water resources management. When scientists and engineers apply one of these models to address a specific question, they must devote significant effort to set up, calibrate, and evaluate that model instance built for some place and time. In many cases, there is a benefit to sharing these computer models and associated datasets with the broader scientific community. Core to model reuse in any context is metadata describing the model. A standardized metadata …

Small Farms Dams Modelling In Highly Anthropized Basins: Case Of The Garonne Catchment In The South-West Of France, François Moussu, Pierre Le Moigne, Pierre Le Cointe, Camille Truche, Olivier Therond, Eric Martin, Florence Habets

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

One of the aims of the REGARD project is to evaluate the influence of human activities in the modelling of water resources in the South-West of France, at the scale of the Garonne Watershed (~55 000 km²). Since 2009 the French government introduced a new regulation of agricultural water withdrawals, to avoid regular crisis due to water resources issues.Our approach consists in accounting for small farm dams in the Safran-Isba-Modcou (SIM) model and to evaluate their impact on river discharges. Several scenarios with different volume capacities, filling catchment sizes and filling periods were tested to assess how the …