Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Leveraging Quality Assurance And Quality Control Processes To Deliver Provenance As A First-Order Scientific Output In Large-Scale Environmental Assessments, William Francis, Nicholas J. Car, Rebecca K. Schmidt, Simon Gallant

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In large-scale environmental assessments, such as the Australian Government Bioregional Assessment Programme, the science is integrated when products (scientific reports) are assembled. Product assembly involves synthesising material written by multiple authors from multiple disciplines and producing standard tables, maps and charts. High-quality products require that quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) procedures are built into the scientific and publication processes.

Further, funders and stakeholders are increasingly demanding that scientists provide sufficient infor- mation to explain and justify the evidence provided, even to the extent that an independent group can repeat the science. Recording an effective lineage of processes and data …

An Extendable Experiment With Gis And Ict To Make Environmental Data And Modeling User-Friendly And Accessible, Saurav Kumar, Adil N. Godrej, Thomas J. Grizzard, Harold E. Post

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory (OWML), has been monitoring the Occoquan Reservoir and its tributary watershed in Washington DC suburb for over 40 years. OWML has also developed and maintained a state-of-the-art water quality and quantity model for the region based on seven HSPF and two CE-QUAL-W2 software. To make the data and modeling tools easily accessible to stakeholders, OWML has embarked on an experiment to use modern Information Communication Technology (ICT) along with web-mapping systems. As a result the web-portal https://wqdata.owml.vt.edu has been developed to provide easy access to the real-time and historic water resources data for the Occoquan watershed …

Enabling Water Science At The Cuahsi Water Data Center, Alva Couch, Richard Hooper, Jon Pollak, Marie Martin, Martin Seul

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The CUAHSI Water Data Center (WDC) is a community-governed, multi-disciplinary data center focused upon the needs of water-related science in all academic disciplines. The WDC build upon the successes of the 10-year effort to develop the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS), and looks beyond HIS toward providing next-generation water data services. In partnership with the National Science Foundation, the WDC seeks to set the standard for data publication, persistence, and reliability, by providing formal user support services, using cloud-based abstractions and services, building new and accessible user interfaces to data, and establishing and sustaining data curation processes centered around optimizing …

Coupled Simulation Of Human-Driven And Natural Land Cover Change In The Front Range Corridor, Co, Zhihua Liu, Michael C. Wimberly, Aashis Lamsal, Terry L. Sohl, Todd J. Hawbaker

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Colorado Front Range Corridor is a mixture of urban, agricultural, grassland, and diverse forest types, making it an ideal natural laboratory to investigate feedbacks and interactions of coupled human and natural systems. We explored future scenarios of human-driven land use change and natural vegetation dynamics using the CHANGE model, which integrates a demand-allocation land use change module, a succession module for natural vegetation dynamics, and a spatially explicit fire initiation and spread module. We used the model to project landscape change over an approximately 48000 km² study area from 2005 through 2050 under A2 and B1 emission scenarios. …

Model Structure Sensitivity Of River Water Quality Models For Urban Drainage Impact Assessment, Frank Blumensaat, Jana Seydel, Peter Krebs, Peter A. Vanrolleghem

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Numerical modeling of physicochemical conditions in rivers influenced by urban drainage and other pressures is increasingly used as supportive method for an integrative environmental impact assessment. In various European countries, protocols for water quality based impact assessment (WQA protocols) are in use, of which many propse the use of water quality models. Despite the increased effort to study uncertainty issues in river water quality modeling in recent years, identifying and differentiating model structure uncertainty remains a challenging task. This study elaborates upon a key conflict in model development: the need to simplify and to still ensure structural adequacy to obtain …

Vulnerability And Adaptation Of Crop Production To Future Climate Change: A Case Study For Representative Farms In Flathead Valley, Montana, Usa, Tony Prato, Zeyuan Qui

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Future climate change has the potential to adversely impact crop production. This study evaluates the potential impacts of future climate change on crop yields, crop enterprise net returns, and net farm income and the extent to which two forms of adaptation--flexible scheduling of field operations and crop irrigation--alleviate potential negative impacts of climate change on crop production and income in the Flathead Valley of Montana, USA during the evaluation period 2006-2050. Crop yields are simulated using the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model. Net farm income is assessed for small and large representative farms and two common soil types. Without …

A Proposed Approach To The Development Of Federated Model Sets, Kenneth M. Bryden

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Integrated modelling is a critical environmental modelling tool that brings together sets of models and data to describe the impacts of various management practices and choices within the environment. Although each model may (or may not) run on separate hardware, typically these model sets are organized together as a large integrated, centralized model. These integrated models share a single conceptual schema and semantic framework. Additionally, information flow and convergence of boundary conditions between the models are generally built on a fixed framework. Although this is a logical approach that has proven to be effective, it has several limitations. The models …

Nesll Modular, High Performance Lnfrastructure For Earth System Modeling, Cecelia Deluca, Peggy Li, Gerhard Theurich

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The mission of the NOAA Environmental Software lnfrastructure and lnteroperability (NESll) group is to advance understanding and improve predictions of the Earth system by delivering infrastructure software that enables new scientific discoveries, fosters collaborations, and promotes resource efficiency. NESll software supports environmental modeling, data search and analysis, and metadata services. A core capability is the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), a comprehensive object-oriented framework for building and coupling models. However, new development has focused on modular packages that can easily be combined with other software elements to form solutions to complex problems. Such modular packages include ESMPy, a Python grid …

Web Service And Plug-In Architecture For Flexibility And Openness Of Environmental Data Sharing Platforms, Stephen Knox, Philipp Meier, Julien Harou

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The sharing, comparison and maintenance of computer model input and result data for real-world projects is a challenge. In collaborative research projects, particularly when collaboration occurs between multiple institutions in different locations, the complications are greater still. The co-development of water resource network simulation and optimization models is one field that faces this challenge. There is a need for ways to allow multiple users to build and apply models collaboratively. This paper argues that a web service architecture is an appropriate approach for multi-institution maintenance of resource network models. We describe the design of a prototype system that allows developers …

Use Of Near Real Time Earth Observation Data Infrastructures And Open Source Tools For Water Resources Monitoring And Assessment, Chris M. Mannaerts, Ben H.P. Maathuis, Petra E. Budde

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Since several years, a rapid and ever increasing public use of geo-information data derived from earth observation satellites is noted. The use of Google and Microsoft Virtual Earth engines can be seen as generic examples of this trend. For hydrology, water resources research and professional practice, we also note a growing availability of earth observation (EO) data and products, needed for operational land and water management. Many of these data are public domain and made freely available using low-cost global data dissemination infrastructures like GEONETCast, managed by the spaces agencies EUMETSAT and NOAA amongst others, within the context of the …

An Integrative Modeling Framework To Evaluate Wheat Production Systems: Fusarium Head Blight, Willingthon Pavan, José Maurício Cunha Fernandes, Alexandre Lazzaretti, Josué Toebe, Jorge Luis Bavaresco, Alex C. Ruane, Rodrigo Yoiti Tsukahara

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This paper describes a practical, integrated, web-based and user friendly analysis tool for crop model users that provides quality control of input data, tracks user selections in model parameterization, and enables visual analysis of model outcomes using a single graphical user interface. This allows the user to undertake numerous steps in crop modeling and analysis in a seamless and integrated environment. The analysis and visualization components of the system were enabled utilizing R (pl/r) and the robustness of the underlying data structures and coupling point between crop and disease models were achieved through use of PostgreSQL database management system. The …

Applications Of Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (Qmra) To Regulatory Decision Making, Adam W. Olivieri, Edmund Y. Seto, Richard E. Danielson, Jeffrey A. Soller, Robert C. Cooper

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Intelligent risk-based decision-making requires a clear and transparent framework, and as part of that framework, includes a tractable analysis and balancing of various qualities of information from numerous sources. The purpose of this paper is to provide a number of examples on the application of QMRA, and how the information was utilized to aid and facilitate decision-making as part of the regulatory process for evaluating water recycling and municipal treatment plant discharges.

Feedback Versus Uncertainty, Ronald R. P. Van Nooijen, Markus Hrachowitz, Alla G. Kolechkina

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Even without uncertainty about the model structure or parameters, the output of a hydrological model run still contains several sources of uncertainty. These are: measurement errors affecting the input, the transition from continuous time and space to discrete time and space, which causes loss of information about the input, discretization of the model equations resulting in errors due to the discretization scheme and the use of finite precision calculations in model evaluation. Interval analysis can provide upper bounds on the output error due to all of these sources. This paper focuses on tracking uncertainty about input values and the effects …

Kernel Density Independence Sampling Based Monte Carlo Scheme (Kismcs) For Inverse Hydrological Modeling, Mojtaba Shafiei, Shervan Gharari, Saket Pande, Sandjai Bhulai

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Posterior sampling methods are increasingly being used to describe parameter and model predictive uncertainty in hydrologic modelling. This paper proposes an alternative to random walk chains (such as DREAM-zs). We propose a sampler based on independence chains with an embedded feature of standardized importance weights based on Kernel density estimates. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm is proposed with Metropolis-Hastings (M-H) updates using an independence sampler. The independence sampler ensures that candidate observations are drawn independently of the current state of a chain, thereby ensuring efficient exploration of the target distribution. The M-H acceptance-rejection criterion is used to sample …

Apex-Cute: An Auto-Calibration And Uncertainty Analysis Tool For The Apex Model, Xiuying Wang, Haw Yen

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Agricultural Policy Environmental eXtender - auto-Calibration and UncerTainty Estimator (APEX-CUTE) was developed as an open-source tool which enhances the accessibility for APEX users to conduct potentially tedious calibration work on the APEX model. The role of uncertainty analysis should be taken as an independent supporting package to extend the capability in further analytical purposes. This version of APEX-CUTE incorporates relevant functions of uncertainty analysis flexibly. Users have options to include designated uncertainty sources such as input and/or measurement errors during the calibration process. APEX-CUTE is not only the comprehensive package in performing model calibration on APEX, but it can …

Hydroshare: Advancing Collaboration Through Hydrologic Data And Model Sharing, David G. Tarboton, Ray Idaszak, Jeffery S. Horsburgh, Jeff Heard, Dan Ames, Jonathan L. Goodall, Larry Band, Venkatesh Merwade, Alva Couch, Jennifer Arrigo, Richard Hooper, David Valentine, David Maidment

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of HydroShare is to enable hydrology researchers to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop for local analysis and perform analyses in a distributed computing environment that may include grid, cloud or high performance computing. Users may also share and publish outcomes (data, results or models) into HydroShare, using the system as a collaboration platform. HydroShare is expanding the data sharing capability of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System by broadening the classes of data accommodated. HydroShare …

Plug And Play Component Modeling - The Csdms2.0 Approach, James P. Syvitski

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The CSDMS2.0 focus is on developing a software modelling environment that offers the earth and ocean communities products to enable easier penetration into the world of high performance computing, plug-and-play component modelling, and access to vetted open source surface-dynamics models. Protocols and standards define modelling interfaces, standard names, service components, and DOIs labelling.

Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment Of Freshwater Impacted By Animal Fecal Material, Jeffrey Soller, Timothy Bartrand, Marirosa Molina, Gene Whelan, Mary Schoen, Nicholas Ashbolt

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

We evaluated the potential for human illness from a hypothetical recreational exposure to freshwater that was impacted by land-applied, agricultural animal fecal material. The scenario included 1) fresh cattle manure, pig slurry, or chicken litter (fecal material) land-applied, adjacent to a freshwater waterbody at standard agronomic rates (based on nutrient management); 2) fecal materials containing fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) and pathogens of public health concern (reference pathogens) at levels reported in peer-reviewed literature; 3) FIB and reference pathogens mobilized via runoff at rates estimated from our rainfall simulation experiments; 4) primary recreational contact (e.g., swimming) occurring in undiluted runoff at …

Accounting For Groups Of Animals In Qmra Of Recreational Waters, Richard W. Muirhead, Vanessa M. Cave

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The development of QMRA for recreational waters often involves assessing the inputs from multiple sources, including human sewage, agricultural sources and wild animals. The concentrations of microorganisms in faeces from individual animals are highly variable leading to a broad spectrum of risk. When modelling the load of faecal microbes from a group of animals, based on data from individuals, the group distribution must be correctly accounted for. A further complication to QMRA is that pathogen concentrations in faeces have a high proportion of non-detects making them difficult to model using standard mathematical distributions. Moreover, when only limited concentration data are …

Towards An Interoperable And Distributed E-Infrastructure For Hydro-Meteorology: The Drihm Project, Antonella Galizia, Daniele D’Agostino, Alfonso Quarti, Gabriele Zereik, Luca Roverelli, Emanuele Danovaro, Andrea Clematis, Fabio Delogu, Antonio Parodi, Quillon Harpham, Bert Jagers, Luis Garrote, Ljiljana Dekic, Vladimir Dimitrijevic, Evelyne Richard, Olivier Caumont

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Predicting weather and climate and its impacts on the environment, including hazards such as floods and landslides, is one of the main challenges of the 21st century with significant societal and economic implications. To advance the state of the art in forecasting extreme events, an effective collaboration with the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) scientific community is necessary to address challenges in combining meteorological, hydrological, hydraulic and impact observations and modelling tools seemingly and in a platform that allows scenario building and decision-support. With these issues in mind, the Dis- tributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology (DRIHM) project aims at setting …

A Spatial Planning Tool For The Evaluation Of The Effect Of Hydrological And Land-Use Changes On Ecosystem Services, Leon Mugwiza, Seleshi Yalew, Johannes Van Der Kwast, Masoom Hamdard, Willem Van Deursen

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Many point-based models have been designed to simulate hydrology, gas flux, nutrient dynamics, and/or plant growth processes at a single point on the landscape. However, these environmental processes are known to be spatially variable. Simulations at different spatial locations therefore require adjustment of model input parameters to reflect specific conditions at each location. Increased availability of geospatial data sets, including remote sensing images, land cover maps, digital soil surveys, crop yield maps, and vehicle-based plant or soil maps, can support spatial model parameterization efforts. However, tools are needed for processing geospatial data layers and interfacing the data with the simulation …

Silvio, Modelling Social Vulnerability Under A Local Perspective, Thaís López-Inojosa, Martina Neuburger, Sebastian Medina-Plascencia, Framklin Davila

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The objective of this research is to develop and to model an indicator of social vulnerability as part of a multidimensional, multivariable and non linear process. Social vulnerability can be considered as a complex system, in which many relationships in society and environment can be described by considering individual and structural factors. Numerous studies provide tools to analyze and revise social systems but these tools were developed generalizing and overviewing the relationship among many intermediate realities, for another type of systems, more formalized and conceptualized. Social systems do not have this classical formalization. The development of the SocIaL Vulnerability I …

Reproducible Research Within The Datanet Federation Consortium, Reagan W. Moore, Arcot Rajasekar

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The DataNet Federation Consortium (DFC) is an NSF funded project that provides cyberinfrastructure for federating data management systems into a collaboration environment. Researchers are able to build a shared collection, apply analysis workflows, and manage the analysis results. The shared collections may span storage resources at multiple institutions, and multiple types of data management systems. The analysis workflows may include staging of files to remote compute platforms, and in-place analysis at the remote data storage location. The workflows can be captured as shareable objects, with automatic capture of input files, input parameters, and output files. A key feature is support …

Controls On Hydrologic Partitioning: Using A Mechanistic Model For Comparative Hydrology Across Ungauged Sub-Catchments In A Mountain Headwater Basin, Christa Kelleher, Thorsten Wagener, Francesca Pianosi, Brian Mcglynn

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Headwater streams are the most abundant portion of the river network but the least monitored. As such, we have a limited understanding of headwater stream behaviours and how they are influenced by catchment properties such as topography, geology, and vegetation. Given the lack of runoff monitoring within headwater streams, improving an understanding of how catchment properties influence hydrologic behaviour is necessary for transferring information from instrumented areas to ungauged sites. We utilize this concept to understand physical controls on similarities and differences in hydrologic behaviour for five adjacent sub-catchments located in the Tenderfoot Creek Experimental Forest in central Montana with …

Estimating The Benefits Of Early Warning Systems In Reducing Urban Flood Risk To People: A Spatially Explicit Bayesian Model., Stefano Balbi, Ferdinando Villa, Vahid Mojthaed, Carlo Giupponi

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Flood risk assessment usually focuses on damages to material objects (indirect tangible costs) and downplays the broader socio-economic aspects of flood-prone systems. Such aspects are crucial for an accurate assessment of risk to human receptors and of the benefits of non-structural measures. For example, an early warning system (EWS) that reduces the amount of direct tangible costs only partially could: (i) save lives (direct intangible costs); (ii) help avoid long-lasting trauma (indirect intangible costs); (iii) prevent post-disaster evacuation costs (indirect tangible costs). We present a methodology to assess flood risk to people, which integrates people's vulnerability and ability to cushion …

Overview And Application Of The Model Optimization, Uncertainty, And Sensitivity Analysis (Mouse) Toolbox, James C. Ascough Ii, Christian Fischer, Nathan Lighthart, Olaf David, Timothy R. Green, Sven Kralisch

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

For several decades, optimization and sensitivity/uncertainty analysis of environmental models has been the subject of extensive research. Although much progress has been made and sophisticated methods developed, the growing complexity of environmental models to represent real­ world systems makes it increasingly difficult to fully comprehend model behavior, sensitivities and uncertainties. This paper provides an overview of the Model Optimization, Uncertainty, and SEnsitivity Analysis (MOUSE) software application, an open-source, Java-based toolbox of visual and numerical analysis components for the evaluation of environmental models. MOUSE is based on the OPTAS model calibration system developed for the Jena Adaptable Modeling System framework, is …

Amadeus: A System For Monitoring Water Quality Parameters And Predicting Contaminant Paths, Abdeltawab M. Hendawi, David Hazel, Joel Larson, Yiru Li, Dwaine Trummert, Mohamed Ali, Ankur Teredesai

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Managing the water quality in an urban environment is extremely challenging. While it flows, the water picks up pollutants such as lawn care chemicals, oil, and pet waste bacteria. In fact, topography plays a factor in where water runoff goes. However, there are many other factors, such as urban density, impermeable surface coverage, weather events and tidal patterns which all have the potential to impact not only the final destination of a particular pollutant but also the rate of travel along the route. In this paper, we propose a system, named AMADEUS (Azure Marketplace of Applications for Diverse Environmental Use …

Socio-Economic Regional Risk Assessment (Serra) Application To Flood Risk In The Vipacco Basin (North-East Italy), Claudia De Luca, Vahid Mojtahed, Animesh Gain, Stefano Balbi, Michele Ferri, Carlo Giupponi

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

According to EEA (European Environmental Agency), flood is the most dangerous natural hazard in Europe in terms of economic losses. The KULTURisk Project (EU FP7) has developed a novel methodology for evaluating the integrated benefits of risk prevention of water related natural hazards: SERRA (i.e. Socio-Economic Regional Risk Assessment). The proposed methodology enhances the traditional flood risk assessment. Several case studies across Europe allowed for the consolidation, validation, and refinement of SERRA. This paper presents the results of its application to assess the benefits derived from the installation of an Early Warning System in Vipacco river basin in Friuli Venezia …

Investigating Parameter Sensitivity For Management In Snow-Driven Watersheds, Elizabeth Houle, Joseph Kasprzyk

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Recent projections of environmental change have shown possible variation to temperature and precipitation patterns due to climate change. In snowmelt-dominated watersheds, adapting to such environmental changes requires a detailed understanding of hydrological processes in addition to historical snow cover and streamflow data. Snow models are often incorporated as an additional component of hydrological modeling studies that inform research and operations management. However, previous research and parameter estimation approaches using snow models assume that parameters have a single optimal value and that each parameter is sensitive. This paper demonstrates that an improved understanding of snow model parameter sensitivity can aid in …

Agent-Based Virtual Laboratories For A Novel Experimental Approach To Socio-Environmental Synthesis, Nicholas R. Magliocca, Mary Shelley, Mike Smorul

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The number of agent-based modeling (ABM) applications within the socio-environmental context has exploded over the last decade. Most of these ABMs have been designed to deepen our understanding of the decision-making processes and human-environment interactions that lead to emergent community- and/or landscape-level outcomes in specific locations and contexts. While these 'case-based' ABMs have generally been successful in this aim - to which their popularity attests - little progress has been made through this case-based approach towards the ultimate goal of building coherent theory about the structure, dynamics, and sustainability of socio-environmental systems. Moving away from case-based ABMs, this paper will …