Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Water Resource Management
Assessing the Impact of Storm Drains at Road Embankments on Diffuse Particulate Phosphorus Emissions in Agricultural Catchments
Published: 2019-01-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
This study presents a simple mapping key suitable for quick and systematic assessments of the types of agricultural and civil engineering structures present in a certain agricultural catchment as well as the impact they may have on the spatial distribution of critical source areas. An application of this mapping key to three small sub-catchments of a case study catchment with an area of several [...]
Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves at the global scale
Published: 2018-12-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves usefully quantify extreme precipitation over various durations and return periods for engineering design. Unfortunately, sparse, infrequent or short observations hinder the creation of robust IDF curves in many locations. This paper presents the first global, multi-temporal (1 to 360 hours) dataset of Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) parameters at 31 km [...]
Report for the Puding Government on the China-UK Karst Knowledge Exchange Project
Published: 2018-12-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Water Resource Management
The report summaries the first stage output from the Knowledge Exchange (KE) research carried out in one of China’s rural areas in the karst landscape, aiming to understand the local knowledge sharing dynamic and learning preference of stakeholders. A social science survey was carried out in November 2016 in 7 villages of Puding County to 15 county leaders, 8 town leaders and 24 village leaders [...]
Summary Report of China-UK Knowledge Exchange Project for Their Critical Zone Programme
Published: 2018-12-12
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Water Resource Management
Global to local environmental policy-making is increasingly evidenced-based. Knowledge exchange (KE) is increasingly used by environmental scientists and policymakers, to deliver evidence-based policy and practice. This study presents the output from the KE research project within the China-UK Critical Zone (CZ) programme in China from 2016 to 2018, focussing on understanding: (i) the key issues [...]
Critical Review of Polyphosphate and Polyphosphate Accumulating Organisms for Agricultural Water Quality Management
Published: 2018-12-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science, Water Resource Management
Despite ongoing management efforts, phosphorus (P) loading from agricultural landscapes continues to impair water quality. Wastewater treatment research has enhanced our knowledge of microbial mechanisms influencing P cycling, especially regarding microbes known as polyphosphate accumulating organisms (PAOs) that store P as polyphosphate (polyP) under oxic conditions and release P under anoxic [...]
Rapid and accurate estimates of streamflow depletion caused by groundwater pumping using analytical depletion functions
Published: 2018-11-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Reductions in streamflow due to groundwater pumping (‘streamflow depletion’) can negatively impact water users and aquatic ecosystems but are challenging to estimate due to the time and expertise required to develop numerical models often used for water management. Here, we develop analytical depletion functions, which are simpler approaches consisting of (i) stream proximity criteria which [...]
Spectral Mixture Analysis as a Unified Framework for the Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration
Published: 2018-10-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
This analysis proposes a unified framework for estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) using spectral mixture analysis (SMA) based on globally standardized substrate, vegetation, and dark (SVD) endmembers (EMs). Using all available Landsat 8 scenes from a month in the peak growing season (June) in a diverse 90 x 120 km region in northern California, we characterize the relationship between each of [...]
Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning
Published: 2018-09-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Climate, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management
Water resources planning requires making decisions about infrastructure development under substantial uncertainty in future regional climate conditions. However, uncertainty in climate change projections will evolve over the 100-year lifetime of a dam as new climate observations become available. Flexible strategies in which infrastructure is proactively designed to be changed in the future have [...]
GLOBAL WATER TRANSFER MEGAPROJECTS: A SOLUTION FOR THE WATER-FOOD-ENERGY NEXUS?
Published: 2018-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Globally, freshwater is unevenly distributed, both in space and time. Climate change, land use alteration, and increasing human exploitation will further increase the pressure on water as a resource for human welfare and on inland water ecosystems. Water transfer megaprojects (WTMP), i.e. large-scale engineering interventions to divert water within and between catchments, represent an approach in [...]
A mathematical morphology approach to the identification of drought events in space and time
Published: 2018-08-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Drought events occur worldwide and possibly incur severe consequences. Trying to understand and characterizing drought events is of primordial importance in order to improve the preparedness for coping with future events. In this paper, drought events are characterized by exploiting their spatio-temporal nature. Operators borrowed from mathematical morphology are applied to represent drought [...]
Historical trajectories of disaster risk in Dominica
Published: 2018-07-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science, Tectonics and Structure, Water Resource Management
The calamitous consequences of Hurricane Maria (2017) for the Caribbean island of Dominica highlighted the acute and increasing susceptibility of the region to hazard events. Despite the increasing international attention given to disaster risk reduction, recovery from hazard events can be especially lengthy and difficult for Small Island Developing States. In this paper we build on existing [...]
Evaluation of open-access global digital elevation models (AW3D30, SRTM and ASTER) for flood modelling purposes
Published: 2018-06-25
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Computer Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Digital Elevation Models (DEM) are a key piece of information for the accurate representation of topographic controls exerted in hydrologic and hydraulic models. Many practitioners rely on open-access global datasets usually obtained from space-borne survey due to the cost and sparse coverage of sources of higher resolution. In may 2016 the Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency publicly released an [...]
Quantifying the Fate of Wastewater Nitrogen Discharged to a Canadian River
Published: 2018-06-21
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Systems Biology, Water Resource Management
Addition of nutrients, such as nitrogen, can degrade water quality in lakes, rivers, and estuaries. To predict the fate of nutrient inputs, an understanding of the biogeochemical cycling of nutrients is needed. We develop and employ a novel, parsimonious, process-based model of nitrogen concentrations and stable isotopes that quantifies the competing processes of volatilization, uptake, [...]
Insights into agricultural influences and weathering processes from major ion patters
Published: 2018-06-04
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Karst areas and their catchments pose a great challenge for protection because fast conduit flow results in low natural attenuation of anthropogenic contaminants. Studies of the hydrochemistry of karst sources and river solutes are an important tool for securing and managing water resources. A study of the geochemical downriver evolution of the Wiesent River and its tributaries, located in a [...]
Towards a global interpretation of dual nitrate isotopes in natural water
Published: 2018-05-22
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Modern anthropogenic activities have significantly increased nitrate (NO3-) concentrations in surface waters. Stable isotopes (δ15N and δ18O) in NO3- offer a tool to deconvolute some of the human-made changes in the nitrogen cycle. They are often graphically illustrated on a template designed to identify different sources of NO3- and denitrification. In the two decades since this template was [...]