Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Towards Sociobiogeochemistry: Critical Perspectives On Anthropogenic Alterations To Soil Nitrogen Chemistry Via U.S. Urban And Suburban Development, Christopher D. Ryan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ecological impacts of changes to land use are relevant to concerns about climate change, eutrophication of waterbodies, and reductions in biodiversity. As a foundational component of ecosystem functioning, changes to soil biogeochemistry have significant effects on overall ecosystem health. With cities continuing to grow and develop in extent, the impacts of urbanization and suburbanization on soils are of particular concern. Despite a wide range of natural climatic and geologic conditions, several factors have driven similar patterns of land transformation and management across the United States. In particular, federal initiatives including the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, …

Ulva Spp. Bloom Dynamics In A Hyper-Eutrophic Estuary: Jamaica Bay, New York, Annesia Lamb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I present three studies that further our understanding of macroalgae identity, growth, and proliferation. Eutrophication is prevalent in shallow coastal ecosystems world-wide. One of the ecosystem consequences is the development of a bloom forming green marine macroalgae, Ulva spp. Ulva can have negative effects such as Zostera spp. degradation, fish, and shellfish declines. I performed assessments of (1) identity of the bloom-forming Ulva and other macroalgae assemblage, (2) physical, chemical, and biological drivers of Ulva bloom growth and proliferation, and (3) optimal irradiance and temperature requirements for early growth stages in Ulva linza.

The first study …

Onshore Wind Speed Modulates Microbial Aerosols Along An Urban Waterfront, M. Elias Drucker, Gregory D. O'Mullan, Joaquín Martínez Martínez, Andrew R. Juhl, Kathleen C. Weathers

Publications and Research

Wind blowing over aquatic and terrestrial surfaces produces aerosols, which include microbial aerosols. We studied the effect of onshore wind speeds on aerosol concentrations as well as total and culturable microbial aerosols (bacterial and viral) at an urban waterfront (New York, NY, USA). We used two distinct methods to characterize microbial aerosol responses to wind speed: A culture-based exposure-plate method measuring viable bacterial deposition near-shore (CFU accumulation rate); and a culture-independent aerosol sampler-based method measuring total bacterial and viral aerosols (cells m−3 air). While ambient coarse (>2 µm) and fine (0.3–2 µm) aerosol particle number concentrations (regulated indicators of …

Water Conservation To Reduce Wet Weather Pollution Loads To The Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, Ny, Suzanne Carol Stempel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public participation plays an important role in wet weather pollution management. However, the effects of participation programs on local water quality are often difficult to quantify. This project aims to quantify the potential effects of a community based, non-structural, BMP aimed at controlling inputs to combined sewage systems by encouraging residents to reduce their water use during rain events. A household could participate by reducing the amount of water they use for flushing toilets, washing dishes, taking showers, etc. during rain events; thereby reducing stress on the system during the time of highest demand. The Gowanus Canal sewershed in Brooklyn, …

Catchment-Scale Water Quality Monitoring, Control And Management Framework Using Collaborative Wireless Sensor Networks, Huma Zia, Nick Harris, Geoff Merrett

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Improving water quality is a global concern, with agricultural practices being the major contributors to reduced water quality. The reuse of nutrient-rich drainage water can be a valuable strategy to maximise water resources and gain economic-environmental benefits. Transmitting event information across a catchment, as the event occurs upstream, allows prediction of the outflow dynamics of the expected discharges downstream. Here, we propose a framework architecture which utilises increasingly common local farm-scale networks and other water-quality monitoring networks across a catchment, adding provision for collaborative information sharing. The key part is that individual networks learn their environment, predicting the impact of …

Developing Landsat Based Algorithms To Augment In Situ Monitoring Of Freshwater Lakes And Reservoirs, Eliza Deutsch, Ibrahim Alameddine, Mutasem El-Fadel

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Many lakes and reservoirs lack adequate water quality monitoring programs. With little information on the state of these systems, managing these resources and their contributing watersheds is a challenge. The use of remote sensing presents an opportunity to better characterize these freshwater systems. The full potential of using the Landsat program to measure optically active water quality parameters, such as chlorophyll-a, suspended sediments and water clarity was explored using the Qaraoun Reservoir in Lebanon as a case study. An in situ monitoring program was developed and synchronized with the overpass of Landsat 7 and the newly launched Landsat 8 satellites …

Enhancing Water Quality Data Service Discovery And Access Using Standard Vocabularies, Jonathan Yu, Bruce A. Simons, Nicholas J. Car, Simon J.D. Cox

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

There is a growing need for consistency across the publishing, discovering, integrating and access to scientific datasets, such as water quality data. Such datasets may have varying formats and service interfaces. The Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) is both a software package and a data format for producing array-oriented scientific data, which is commonly used to exchange data, including water quality data. NetCDF datasets are also published through service interfaces using the THREDDS data server. Alternatively water quality datasets can be encoded with standard XML formats such as WaterML 2.0, which can be published with services such as the Open …

A Harmonized Vocabulary For Water Quality, Simon J.D. Cox, Bruce A. Simons, Jonathan Yu

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Interoperability of water quality data depends on the use of common models, schemas and vocabularies. However, terms are usually collected during different activities and projects in isolation of one another, resulting in vocabularies that have the same scope being represented with different terms, using different formats and formalisms, and published in various access methods. Significantly, most water quality vocabularies conflate multiple concepts in a single term, e.g. quantity kind, units of measure, substance or taxon, medium and procedure. This bundles information associated with separate elements from the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) model into a single slot. We have developed …

Soft Sensing The Potential Amount Of Calcium Carbonate Precipitate In Drinking Water Distribution Infrastructure And Warm Water Household Appliances, Dirk Vries, Joost Van Summeren, Benjamin Van Den Akker, Alex Van Der Helm, Ignaz Worm, Peter Van Thienen

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

A soft sensor is developed to predict the potential amount of precipitation of calcium carbonate (CCPP) in warm water household devices and scaling or corrosive behavior in water distribution networks. With the aid of a water supply network model, it is shown that the soft sensor is able to predict CCPP levels at pre-specified downstream nodes using only measurements at a limited set of upstream nodes. Furthermore, the soft sensor consists of a data assimilation algorithm to provide for best estimates of the CCPP and confidence intervals.

Adaptive, Decentralized, And Real-Time Sampling Strategies For Resource Constrained Hydraulic And Hydrologic Sensor Networks, Brandon Preclaro Wong, Branko Kerkez

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

We discuss the development and performance of a low-power sensor node (hardware, software and algorithms) that autonomously controls the sampling interval of a suite of sensors based on local state estimates and future predictions of water flow. The problem is motivated by the need to accurately reconstruct abrupt state changes in urban watersheds and stormwater systems. Presently, the detection of these events is limited by the temporal resolution of sensor data. It is often infeasible, however, to increase measurement frequency due to energy and sampling constraints. This is particularly true for real-time water quality measurements, where sampling frequency is limited …

Hydrodynamic And Water Quality Surrogate Modeling For Reservoir Operation, Juan Aguilar, Schalk-Jan Van Andel, Micha Werner, Dimitri P. Solomatine

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

A methodology is developed for reservoir release decisions considering forecasted downstream dissolved oxygen local conditions. River water quality management using reservoirs focuses mainly on how to develop a release schedule that may improve downstream conditions based on the seasonal change of the water quality within the reservoir. This improvement, however does not take into account the downstream local water quality state, which in certain cases might be more important, as the pollutant load downstream could be diluted with the upstream available volume released from the reservoir. Field sampling collected data suggest that the dissolved oxygen concentration decay produced by polluted …

Optimal Tank Design And Operation Strategy To Enhance Water Quality In Distribution Systems, Alemtsehay G. Seyoum, Tiku T. Tanyimboh, Calvin Siew

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Water storage tanks are key components of water distribution networks (WDNs) and are primarily designed and operated to meet demand variations and pressure needs. However, the common practice in the design of WDNs is to incorporate large storage tanks that may possibly create long residence time. Long residence time is a major contributing factor for loss of disinfectant, increased formation of disinfection by products and microbial regrowth. Also, poor choice in tank geometry, location and operation can play a role in deterioration of water quality. Most of the previous approaches on optimisation of WDNs design and operation do not take …

Numerical Study On Climate Variation And Population Growth Impacts On An Australian Subtropical Water Supply Reservoir, Edoardo Bertone, Rodney Stewart, Hong Zhang, Kelvin O'Halloran

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Proactively managing high manganese (Mn) concentrations in drinking water supply reservoirs can be problematic for treatment plant operators. Typically, Mn monitoring is conducted manually and costly on a regular basis (e.g. weekly) throughout the entire year through water samplings and laboratory analysis. However, in the major water supply reservoir of the sub-tropical Gold Coast City region in Australia (i.e. Hinze Dam), a vertical profiling system (VPS) was installed and enabled a real-time data acquisition of many physical parameters of water. But these VPS parameters are not able to directly collect and analyse Mn concentrations. In the present study, a Decision …

Self-Organizing Maps For Knowledge Discovery From Corporate Databases To Develop Risk Based Prioritization For Stagnation, Stephen Robert Mounce, Rebecca Sharpe, Vanessa Speight, Barrie Holden, Joby Boxall

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Stagnation or low turnover of water within water distribution systems may result in water quality issues, even for relatively short durations of stagnation / low turnover if other factors such as deteriorated aging pipe infrastructure are present. As leakage management strategies, including the creation of smaller pressure management zones, are implemented increasingly more dead ends are being created within networks and hence potentially there is an increasing risk to water quality due to stagnation / low turnover. This paper presents results of applying data driven tools to the large corporate databases maintained by UK water companies. These databases include multiple …

Alternative Strategies For Optimal Water Quality Sensor Placement In Drinking Water Distribution Networks, Peter Van Thienen

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The most commonly applied strategies for optimal water quality sensor placement in drinking water distribution systems are aimed at contamination early warning systems. These strategies aim to minimize the number of people affected in case of a deliberate contamination of drinking water in the distribution system, and provide a valuable tool. A number of factors which are usually not taken into account, including the response strategy to the identification of a contamination event, the fallibility of sensors and changes in network configuration (valve manipulation) and operation, may affect the results of these strategies. Since the quickness and effectiveness of a …

Development Of Real-Time Drinking Water Distribution Systems (Dwds) Modeling Technology Using The Epanet Extended Period Simulation (Eps) Modeling Toolkit, Sudhir Kshirsagar, Walter Grayman, Ben Chenevey, Aditi Shetti, Saurabh Gupta, Benjamin Bedinghaus, Steve Mylroie

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Real-time hydraulic and water quality modeling involves the modification of the EPS network model every few minutes to reflect the SCADA data, and this paper shares how this type of real-time modeling framework, HydroTrek, was built on top of the EPS foundation provided by the EPANET toolkit. The real-life applications of HydroTrek posed some interesting modeling challenges when the hydraulic time-step was reduced to match the SCADA time-step of one to five minutes. For example, a physical pump usually does not instantaneously, but a model pump does. In a sensitive network, that can mean a significant mismatch between the SCADA …

Next Generation Hydro Software, Gennadii Donchyts, Fedor Baart, Arthur Van Dam, Erik De Goede, Joost Icke, Hans Van Putten

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

A few years ago Deltares started a large multidisciplinary project named Next Generation Hydro Software. The main focus of the project is to improve, harmonize and integrate existing hydro software that has been developed throughout the years. Important technological innovations include development of the new computational core D-Flow Flexible Mesh, as well as the user-friendly, open modelling environment Delta Shell. The project involves more than 40 scientists and software engineers. The new integrated system will allow both water managers and modellers to do their work better and faster. The unique characteristic of the project is that it focuses on the …

Estimation Of Phosphorus Bioavailability In The Water Column Of The Bronx River, New York, Jingyu Wang, Hari K. Pant

Publications and Research

Phosphorus (P) is a primary limiting nutrient in rivers and streams, and excessive P results in eutrophication of freshwater systems, in turn, excessive algal growth/toxic algal blooms, oxygen depletion, and water quality degradation. This study analyzed P pool, and hydrolysis of organic P (OP) by native phosphatases (NPase) in the water samples collected in the Bronx River. The soluble reactive P (SRP) of most of the sites’ water collected in 2006 and 2007 were higher (average 67 µg·L–1 and 68 µg·L–1, respectively) than the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) standard of 15 µg·L–1. The SRP% (SRP/TP%) average was 27% in …