Hydrology Commons^™

Using Satellite Observations Of Soil Moisture To Improve Modeling Of Terrestrial Water Cycles, Colin W. Brust

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) describes the flux of water from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere, calculated as the sum of evaporation from soil and leaf surfaces, and transpiration through plant stomata. ET is the largest terrestrial water flux, returning over half of the precipitation that falls on land back to the atmosphere, annually. Additionally, ET plays a key role in Earth’s carbon, water, and energy cycles, linking them together via the movement of water and CO₂ through plant stomata. Because of its important role in these Earth system processes, it is essential that existing methods of measuring and modeling …

Attribution Of Soil Surface Temperature Sensitivity To Hydro-Climatic Drivers, Sarah Khalid, Marco Maneta

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Greenhouse gas emissions caused by human economic activity are altering the global hydrologic cycle and the energy exchanges at the land surface. In large portions of the western US there is evidence of reduced summertime precipitation and increased air temperatures and longwave irradiation. At local scales, these changes can translate into more frequent and intense extreme land surface temperature events during the summer, with potential impacts on wildfire activity, forest health, soil biochemical cycles, and thermal comfort for human populations. However, because increases in radiation and sensible heat (air temperature) inputs to the land surface are confounded with changes in …

Age-Specific And Species-Specific Tree Response To Seasonal Drought In Tropical Dry Forests, Emily A. Santos

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Millions of people live in or depend on ecoregions dominated by Tropical Dry Forests (TDFs), but due to their high accessibility, convenient topography and mild climate conditions their distribution is fragmented with less than 10% of their original extent remaining in many countries. Despite the vast ecosystem services provided by TDFs, including vital water resources in water limited environments, ecohydrological research in this biome has been limited to a small number of short-term investigations. Similar to worldwide trends, the TDF surrounding Bahía de Caráquez (Bahía), Ecuador, has been severely deforested over the past 400 years. The land use history in …

Transforming Agriculture In The Pilbara: Processing Airborne Electromagnetic (Aem) Data, Aaron C. Davis, Mike Donn, John A. Simons, Christopher Schelfhout Dr, Olga Barron

Natural resources commissioned reports

This report focusses on pre-processing, inversion, and post-processing of airborne electromagnetic (AEM) data from a SkyTEM 312M helicopter-borne time-domain AEM survey conducted north of Newman, Western Australia in October and November 2019. Flight lines for the survey were chosen to trend east-west at 400 m line-spacing in order to produce gridded products at 100 m by 100 m resolution. The line directions were chosen in order to best intersect the Fortescue River Fault which separates the Wittenoom Formation from the Pinjian Chert Formation and Manganese Group, and to map the distribution of transported materials in the alluvial fan north of …

Understanding The Mechanisms Controlling The Concentration-Discharge Relationships Of Streams In Northeastern And North Midwestern United States, Veronica Porter

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Analysis of concentration-discharge (C-Q) power-law relationships (C=aQ^b) is a powerful diagnostic tool to unravel solute export processes. However, application to watersheds with less intensive data can be difficult due to unexplained variation in C-Q behavior. To tackle this problem, I started my study at a small but data-intensive watershed in Vermont and then applied the insights to 138 watersheds throughout the Great Lakes Basin (GLB). I found that an increase in solute concentrations from shallow to deep flowpaths results in chemodynamic dilution (negative b-coefficient), a decrease produces chemodynamic flushing (positive b-coefficient). When applied …

Dissolved Organic Matter Movement Across Lake Superior’S Terrestrial-Stream-Coastal Interface, Karl M. Meingast

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) represents a carbon pool that can be easily translocated between ecosystems with the movement of water. This study examines the controls on DOM quantity and character delivered to Lake Superior primarily during the snowmelt period. We employed long-term stream dissolved organic carbon (DOC) data to determine quantity as well as absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy to analyze DOM structure. Our results indicate that an increasing trend in DOC concentrations, likely driven by decreases in acidity of precipitation, combined with slightly less annual runoff have resulted in relatively constant fluxes of DOM to Lake Superior. Additionally, our study …

Mammals Inventory Of The Kihansi River Gorge In Udzungwa Mountains, Tanzania, Dennis K. Ikanda, Samuel N. Mtoka, Mustafa Hassanali, Anna Mshanga

Tanzania Journal of Science

The Kihansi gorge montane forest in Udzungwa Mountains forms part of the Eastern Arc Mountains (EAM) which contain some of the most biologically diverse and endemic montane ecosystems in all of Africa. The Kihansi river gorge was opened up for hydroelectric development in the late 1990s, attracting hundreds of farming communities whose activities lead to environmental degradation and hence presumed biodiversity loss in the montane forest which is not understood. Using camera traps, an inventory of mammals of the area was conducted for 24 consecutive days. About 14 mammal species were photo captured, indicating diverse assemblage of large and medium …

Crop Pests, Control Measures And Potential Impacts In Kihansi Catchment Area, Beatrice Pallangyo, K. Mdily, C. Mkondo, A. Kibola

Tanzania Journal of Science

A baseline survey which covered 349 households in Bomang’ombe and Masisiwe (Kilolo district), Kibengu and Mapanda (Mufindi district) and Chita and Chisano (Kilombero district) was conducted to identify major pests, control measures and potential impacts in Kihansi catchment area. Maize was the most predominant crop being cultivated by 55% of the total respondents in all the study districts. Pests and diseases were the major constraints to crop production, whereby cereal stem borers were the most serious pests being reported by 88.2% of respondents. Application of synthetic pesticides was the major pest control measure, being applied by 66% of the respondents. …

Research Work And Conservation Initiatives In The Kihansi Catchment Ecosystem, Tanzania, Cl Nahonyo

Tanzania Journal of Science

Keynote Address  for the Scientific Conference on Research and Conservation Initiatives in the Kihansi Catchment Ecosystem: Successes, Challenges and Way forward held at the National Carbon Monitoring Centre (NCMC), Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) on 24 – 27 July 2017.

Ueb Parallel: Distributed Snow Accumulation And Melt Modeling Using Parallel Computing, Tseganeh Z. Gichamo, David G. Tarboton

Publications

The Utah Energy Balance (UEB) model supports gridded simulation of snow processes over a watershed. To enhance computational efficiency, we developed two parallel versions of the model, one using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and the other using NVIDIA's CUDA code on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Evaluation of the speed-up and efficiency of the MPI version shows that the effect of input/output (IO) operations on the parallel model performance increases as the number of processor cores increases. As a result, although the computation kernel scales well with the number of cores, the efficiency of the parallel code as a whole …

Land Cover Change Detection In The Urban Catchments Of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania Using Remote Sensing And Gis Techniques, Philip Mzava, Joel Nobert, Patrick Valimba

Tanzania Journal of Science

In this study, the Maximum Likelihood (ML) classification, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) methods were applied to three (3) Landsat images collected over time (1979, 1998 and 2014), that contained historical land cover features for the urban catchments of Dar es Salaam. Five major land cover classes were identified, mapped, and the land cover changes investigated. The major land cover changes observed from post-classification comparisons of the classified images are: the forest land losing 17.09% of its area in the period 1979-1998 to other land covers, mainly turning to grassland, and from 1998 to 2014, …

Quantitative Assessment Of Resistivity Anisotropy In Evaluation Of Laminated Shaly Sand Hydrocarbon Reservoirs–A Case Study In The Barents Sea, Norway, Ernest S. Mulaya

Tanzania Journal of Science

Resistivity anisotropy in shaly sand lamination sequences affects the hydrocarbon evaluation in multiple dimensions of petrophysical logs. Currently, vertical resistivity (Rv) and horizontal resistivity (Rh) from 3D triaxial induction measurements can be applied simultaneously to resolve these petrophysical impacts. In this paper, an extensive analysis is offered with a focus on the hydrocarbon evaluation based on advanced petrophysical logs from a well. A critical analysis is done on the three comparable cases including clean formation as a base case, shaly sand case and laminated shaly sand case towards resolving resistivity anisotropy in a typical shaly sand laminated reservoir. The analysis …

Evolution And Stratigraphic Architecture Of Tidal Point Bars With And Without Fluvial Input: Influence Of Variable Flow Regimes On Sediment And Facies Distribution, And Lateral Accretion, Pricilla Souza

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Tide-influenced point bars represent a significant proportion of shallow-marine deposits, commonly developed along meandering channels in most backbarrier and estuarine systems. However, sedimentological studies to characterize this type of deposit are still emerging. They often present very heterogeneous internal architectures which development is controlled by the complex flow patterns operating in tidal environments. The study of the sedimentological and morphological characteristics of these features provides better understanding of the hydrodynamic processes that shape coastal systems and control their evolution as well as it contributes to better reservoir potential prediction and production strategy optimization, as tidal point bars may represent hydrocarbon …

Resolving Time-Space Histories Of Late Cenozoic Bedrock Incision Along The Upper Colorado River, Usa, Andres Aslan, Karl E. Karlstrom, Eric Kirby, Matthew T. Heizler, Darryl E. Granger, James K. Feathers, Paul R. Hanson, Shannon A. Mahan

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The upper Colorado River basin drains the western slope of the Rocky Mountains province of North America and hosts a rich record of fluvial terraces and volcanic deposits that provide an archive of bedrock river incision since the Late Miocene. Here we present new geochronology from fluvial deposits and associated volcanic units using multiple methods (luminescence, cosmogenic-burial, 40Ar/39Ar basalt and detrital sanidine, and U/Pb detrital zircon) to reconstruct a detailed record of bedrock incision in the upper Colorado River over timescales ranging from Miocene to Late Pleistocene. Late Miocene (ca. 11–8 Ma) basalt flows perched 800–1700 m above the Colorado …

Utility Of Bench Scale Sand Tank Experiments At Assessing Permeable Reactive Barrier Design, Brandon Meier

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The objective of this work was to evaluate the utility of bench scale sand tank experiments at assessing permeable reactive barrier (PRB) design. Our criteria for meeting this goal was that differences between PRB designs could be identified solely by measuring concentration in outflow from the sand tank models. For our PRB designs (funnel-and-gate, staggered wells, and parallel bars), numerical simulations clearly showed that PRB design had a quantifiable effect on outflow concentration, provided that the solute reacted with the PRB materials. Conversely, use of a conservative (non-reactive) solute did not allow us to discern between PRB design alternatives. Employing …

Bringing Statistical Learning Machines Together For Hydro-Climatological Predictions - Case Study For Sacramento San Joaquin River Basin, California, Balbhadra Thakur, Ajay Kalra, Sajjad Ahmad, Kenneth W. Lamb, Venkat Lakshmi

Civil and Environmental Engineering and Construction Faculty Research

Study region: Sacramento San Joaquin River Basin, California Study focus: The study forecasts the streamflow at a regional scale within SSJ river basin with largescale climate variables. The proposed approach eliminates the bias resulting from predefined indices at regional scale. The study was performed for eight unimpaired streamflow stations from 1962–2016. First, the Singular Valued Decomposition (SVD) teleconnections of the streamflow corresponding to 500 mbar geopotential height, sea surface temperature, 500 mbar specific humidity (SHUM500), and 500 mbar U-wind (U500) were obtained. Second, the skillful SVD teleconnections were screened non-parametrically. Finally, the screened teleconnections were used as the streamflow predictors …

Improving Aquifer Characterization Through Integration Of Airborne Electromagnetics (Aem) And Well Hydrographs, Jacqueline Polashek

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The objective of this study is to evaluate methods of hydrostratigraphic modeling using geophysics and well hydrographs at the eastern edge of the High Plains aquifer (HPA) in Platte and Colfax counties within Nebraska, USA. The HPA is very heterogeneous in the study area, being hosted by architecturally complex glacial sediments and having many irregular hydraulic boundaries. Further, the HPA exhibits local variations between unconfined and confined conditions. Pumping in such bounded aquifers can be unsustainable because of cost increases and lost agricultural productivity. Moreover, the large drawdowns typical of confined aquifers can contribute to well interference during heavy pumping. …

Employing Earth Observations And Artificial Intelligence To Address Key Global Environmental Challenges In Service Of The Sdgs, Wenzhao Li

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

Earth Observation (EO) data provides the capability to integrate data from multiple sources and helps to produce more relevant, frequent, and accurate information about complex processes. EO, empowered by methodologies from Artificial Intelligence (AI), supports various aspects of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This dissertation presents author’s major studies using EO to fill in knowledge gaps and develop methodologies and cloud-based applications in selected SDGs, including SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), SDG 14 (Life below Water) and SDG 15 (Life on Land). For SDG 6, the study focuses on spatiotemporal water recharge …

Umphlett Qci Dec 2019, Natalie A. Umphlett

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

Highlights for the Basin

Temperature and Precipitation Anomalies

Soil Moisture Conditions

Agriculture

Energy

Infrastructure

Temperature

Precipitation

Groundwater Chemistry And Salinity Processes In The Myalup Region, Adam M. Lillicrap, Richard J. George Dr

Resource management technical reports

The Myalup region, which incorporates the Myalup Irrigated Agriculture Precinct (MIAP), is located about 100 kilometres south of Perth between the southern end of Lake Clifton and the northern tip of the Leschenault Inlet. It covers 17 800 hectares, with about 2100ha being irrigated. The precinct produces mainly carrots, onions, potatoes and leafy vegetables. In 2016–17, the total value of agricultural production for the MIAP, including on-farm processing and packaging, was more than $120 million.

Irrigation water is mainly from the surficial Myalup aquifer, with limited abstraction from the underlying Leederville aquifer. Average annual rainfall is about 800 millimetres, but …