Earth observation data are increasingly ubiquitous, easily accessible, often freely available, and more usable due to improvements in software, data standards, network infrastructure, and national policies. As a result, greater opportunities arise for using these data in emerging fields such as decision support for local and regional environmental and water resources management...
Environmental authorities in Guatemala have become increasingly concerned in the last decade due to the deteriorating condition of the Lake Atitlán watershed. The lake has experienced algae blooms that first appeared in 2009 and now occur almost yearly. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) SERVIR Science Coordination Team and scientists at the University of...
An in-depth ecological analysis of how and why the aquatic community changes over time was conducted for 6 streams on the Fort Polk military base in Louisiana using data collected from 2001 to 2019. Fort Polk is a unique location as nineteen first-order streams are located on the premises belonging to three separate drainages. The primary goal was to determine whether temporal or...
Hydrological drought is challenging managers of western U.S. snowpack-dependent urban water systems. Snowpack, reservoir storage, streamflow dynamics, and demand are routinely assessed to guide water system management and operations, assuming per-capita demand stationarity. Using the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities and two drought scenarios, we investigate water...
Emergency management practitioners, at all hierarchical levels, consider a communication gap to exist between the critical applied knowledge and understanding among emergency first responders (i.e., in the "social cloud" domain) of the scientific data and derived information available from water science research (i.e., in the "science cloud" domain). We posit that this...
We present a set of Google Earth Engine (GEE) tools to process long-term satellite imagery to analyze the time history of algal concentrations in a lake or reservoir. We demonstrate these tools with a case study on Utah Lake, Utah, USA. Our tools collect and process Landsat surface reflectance images from three different Landsat missions: Landsat 5, Landsat 7, and Landsat 8...
In recent years, data and file sharing have advanced significantly, opening doors for engineers from all over the world to stay connected with each other and share data, models, scripts and other information required for scientific and engineering purposes. HydroShare (www.hydroshare.org) was developed by a consortium of universities sponsored by the National Science Foundation...
Citizen science is becoming more and more prominent in everyday life. With this growth in the participation and contribution of scientific research comes an ever-increasing amount of data and findings. The collection of water quality data is just one example out of a plethora that exists. While these types of data are being collected, there are very few open options that allow...
In response to growing energy needs and emerging water insecurity, countries around the world have resorted to building dams of unprecedented size. This dynamism emerged following a global consensus at the end of the 20th century that vowed to transform the large dam industry into one that was sustainable and ecologically sensitive. The consensus evolved due to years of popular...
The current study evaluated the effect of climate change on regional streamflow using General Circulation Models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) for the Pajaro River Watershed (PRW) in central California. The 1/8° latitude-longitude resolution bias-corrected and downscaled CMIP5 projections were utilized under four Representative Concentration...
The agricultural system of coastal regions of Bangladesh is heavily dependent on environmental factors such as the timing, intensity and distribution of the monsoon, soil salinity and the availability of freshwater for irrigation. This study explores and documents the farmers’ practices of innovative approaches to fresh water storage and uses in the agriculture and irrigation in...
The influence of tributaries on mussel assemblages of the river mainstem are poorly understood. This paper aims to understand differences in mussel habitat associations between tributaries and the Neches River mainstem and if the mussel assemblages are nested in tributaries. During the months June through October in 2016, 28 tributaries and 22 mainstem sites were surveyed in the...
The Sharing of water data across disparate computer hardware and software platforms is facilitated by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrological Information System (HIS) and similar open and closed source systems. CUAHSI’s WaterOneFlow (WoF) and WaterML 1.1 web services and data encoding standard have become widely...
Dams design and their operation cause strong environmental alteration and therefore a long-term debate is ongoing for the scale of these projects. At the same time, the concept of Environmental Flow Assessment (EFA) is a crucial element of modified ecosystems featuring large infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs for mitigating potential environmental degradation while they...
It is well established that population and economic growth will present major challenges for meeting the world’s growing water and energy needs over the coming decades. Water scarcity is rapidly affecting every continent and countries are exploring new sources of water to meet the increased demand for fresh water. This paper seeks to make progress in this area by providing new...
The Chunnakam aquifer has high capacity and acceptable quality water for drinking and other usages. Water supplies are generated from this area. Fuel smell had been continuously observed in Chunnakam water intake site. The intake site is located very close to the Chunnakam fossil fuel power station, and on analysis, the intake well and the adjacent wells showed oil contamination...
We present Fics (Fetch information through crowdsourcing), a platform that is ready-to-take posts from social media platforms and infers the water heights referred in them. These posts are expected to come from the citizens who are witnessing a flood event in real time. Fics corrects the spacing in the string, translates the string into corresponding mathematical notations and...
Anticipating a proper management needs for urban stormwater due to climate change is becoming a critical concern to water resources managers. In an effort to identify best management practices and understand the probable future climate scenarios, this study used high-resolution climate model data in conjunction with advanced statistical methods and computer simulation. Climate...
Many studies about climate change impacts assessment are published every year. These studies commonly use a hydroclimatic modelling chain, whose principle is to feed impact models with climate models outputs. An important step in this process is to test the validity of impact models in a climate change context. However, this step is not frequently applied. The aim of this study...
Urban water systems consist of natural and engineered flows of water interacting in complex ways. System complexity can be understood via mass conservative models that account for the interrelationships among all major flows and storages. We have developed a generic urban water system model in the R package CityWaterBalance. CityWaterBalance provides a reproducible workflow for...
In countries with undeveloped waterpower potential, hydropower can be a cost-effective way to generate electricity while also utilizing the country’s renewal natural resources. The purpose of this paper is to present the design, development and testing of the Tethys HydroProspector web application developed to evaluate hydropower feasibility at a site from calculated Flow...
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is the primary U.S. Government agency for water data collection and dissemination. In this role, the USGS has recently created and deployed a National Water Census Data Portal (NWC-DP) which provides access to streamflow, evapotransporation, precipitation, aquatic biology and other data at the national level. Recognizing the value of these data...
The main goal of the current research is to quantify hydropower generation flexibility in a system of ten multi-objective reservoirs on the Federal Columbia River Power System (FCRPS). At a given time step, the flexibility in electricity supply (F(t)) is defined as the remaining capacity after satisfying the scheduled production plan. The scheduled production plan includes the...
This research presents a valuation study of flexibility in hydropower generation. Flexibility herein is considered as a stochastic process and is defined as the difference between the maximum hydropower energy generation capacity and the scheduled energy production plan to meet the demand and obligatory sales of electricity. To value the flexibility, this framework combines...
This paper demonstrates a workflow used by the U.S. Army Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory to quickly generate high-resolution flood inundation maps nearly anywhere in the world. Previous research illustrates that hindcast and forecast streamflow for nearly any river/stream in the world is possible by combining global runoff datasets from land surface models (LSMs) with...