Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Engineering
Evaluating Controller Performance and Placement on System-level Urban Flooding Reduction and Water Quality Improvement
Published: 2020-05-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Increases in urbanization and climate change are forcing urban drainage engineers to more effectively leverage stormwater storage facilities to minimize flooding and water quality impacts. This process becomes increasingly challenging due to the operations of storage coordination across the system-level watershed. This study presents a system-level real-time control simulation for assessing [...]
A Data-driven Improved Fuzzy Logic Control Optimization-simulation Tool for Reducing Flooding Volume at Downstream Urban Drainage Systems
Published: 2020-04-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
The uncertainty of climate change and urbanization imposed additional stress for urban drainage systems (UDSs) by intensifying rainfall frequency and magnifying peak runoff rate. UDSs are among the stormwater infrastructures that can be controlled in real-time for mitigating downstream urban flooding. In this paper, a data-driven improved real-time control optimization-simulation tool called [...]
A Performance Comparison of Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms for Clustering Water Depth Datasets at Urban Drainage Systems
Published: 2020-04-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
As sensor measurements emerge in urban water systems, data-driven unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been drawn tremendous interest in infrastructure monitoring, flow prediction, and pollutant warning recently. However, most of them are applied in water distribution systems, and few studies consider using unsupervised clustering analysis to group the time-series hydraulic-hydrologic [...]
Protecting rivers by integrating supply-wastewater infrastructure planning and coordinating operational decisions
Published: 2020-04-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Placing water quality in rivers at the centre of water infrastructure planning and management is an important objective. In response there has been a range of whole system analyses. Few studies, however, consider both abstraction (water removed from rivers) and discharge (water returned) to inform the future planning of water systems. In this work we present a systems approach to analysing future [...]
External control and automatic calibration of the HEC-RAS NSM-I water quality model
Published: 2020-03-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Calibration of models is a common procedure required to properly reproduce a system under analysis. In the present study, we developed a tool integrating the HEC-RAS NSM-I water quality model with the optimization algorithm SCE-UA in order to allow the automatic calibration. The tool’s performance was assessed in two experiments involving a theoretical situation, when it was used to approximate a [...]
Distributed long-term hourly streamflow predictions using deep learning – A case study for State of Iowa
Published: 2020-03-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Accurate streamflow forecasting has always been a challenge. Although there were many novel approaches using deep learning models, accuracy of these models is often limited to a short lead time. This study proposes a new deep recurrent neural network approach, Neural Runoff Model (NRM), which has been applied on 125 USGS streamflow gages in the State of Iowa for predicting the next 120 hours. We [...]
A Serious Gaming Framework for Decision Support on Hydrological Hazards
Published: 2020-03-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Software Engineering, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
In this study, a web-based decision support tool (DST) was developed for hydrological multi-hazard analysis while employing gamification techniques to introduce a competitive element. The serious gaming environment provides functionalities for intuitive management, visualization, and analysis of geospatial, hydrological, and economic data to help stakeholders in the decision-making process [...]
Power law scaling model predicts N2O emissions along the Upper Mississippi River basin
Published: 2020-03-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Nitrous oxide, N2O, is widely recognized as one of the most important greenhouse gases, and responsible for stratospheric ozone destruction. A significant fraction of N2O emissions to the atmosphere is from rivers. Reliable catchment-scale estimates of these emissions require both high-resolution field data and suitable models able to capture the main processes controlling nitrogen transformation [...]
Tracking Flooding Phase Transitions and Establishing a Passive Hotline with AI-Enabled Social Media Data
Published: 2020-02-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Flooding management requires collecting real-time onsite information widely and rapidly. As an emerging data source, social media demonstrates an advantage of providing in-time, rich data in the format of texts and photos and can be used to improve flooding situation awareness. The present study shows that social media data, with additional information processed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) [...]
Realistic River Image Synthesis using Deep Generative Adversarial Networks
Published: 2020-02-20
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In this paper, we investigate an application of image generation for river satellite imagery. Specifically, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) model capable of generating high-resolution and realistic river images that can be used to support models in surface water estimation, river meandering, wetland loss and other hydrological research studies. First, we summarized an augmented, [...]
On the potential of linked-basin tidal power plants: an operational and coastal modelling assessment
Published: 2020-02-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Single-basin tidal range power plants have the advantage of predictable energy outputs, but feature non-generation periods in every tidal cycle. Linked-basin tidal power systems can reduce this variability and consistently generate power. However, as a concept the latter are under-studied with limited information on their performance relative to single-basin designs. In addressing this, we [...]
Sensitivity Analysis of a Conceptual, Lumped Model Using VARS-TOOL Applied to Western Ghats Catchments of India
Published: 2020-01-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
The present work considers the application of Variogram Analysis of Response Surfaces Toolbox (VARS-TOOL) to identify the sensitive parameters of a rainfall-runoff model in the Netravati river basin of Karnataka, India using the global sensitivity analysis method. The statistical bootstrapping method is used to obtain the confidence intervals around each of the sensitivity indices. The VARS-TOOL [...]
A Multivariate Outlier Detection Approach for Water Footprint Assessments in Shale Formations: Case Eagle Ford Play (Texas)
Published: 2020-01-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
The increasing trend on water use for hydraulic fracturing (HF) in multiple plays across the U.S. has raised the need to improve the HF water management model. Such approaches require good quality datasets, particularly in water stressed regions. In this work, we presented a QA/QC framework for HF data using a multivariate outlier detection methodology based on five univariate techniques: two [...]
Over 1000 rivers accountable for 80% of global riverine plastic emissions into the ocean
Published: 2019-10-24
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Plastic waste increasingly accumulates in the marine environment, but data on the distribution and quantification of riverine sources, required for development of effective mitigation, are limited. Our new model approach includes geographical distributed data on plastic waste, landuse, wind, precipitation and rivers and calculates the probability for plastic waste to reach a river and [...]
Network topology and rainfall controls on the variability of combined sewer overflows and loads
Published: 2019-10-24
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Water and pollutant fluxes from combined sewer overflows (CSO) have a significant impact on receiving waters. The random nature of rainfall forcing dominates the variability of sewer discharges, pollutant loads, and concentrations. An analytical model developed here, shows how sewer network topology and rainfall properties variously impact the stochasticity of CSO functioning. Probability [...]