New developments in water efficiency

1Water LossInitiativesUnaccounted-for water(or unbilled water)has beenreceiving newscrutiny at both the state and nationallevels.For years,water conservationeffortsin Europehave emphasized reduction in water loss to a muchgreater extent thaninthe United S…     

Observations of the convective plume of a lake under cold-air advective conditions

Moderating effects of Lake Apopka, Florida on downwind surface temperatures were evaluated under cold-air advective conditions. Point temperature measurements north and south of the lake and data obtained from a thermal scanner flown at 1.6 km indicate that surface temperatures directly downwind may be higher than surrounding surface temperatures by as much as 5 °C under conditions of moderate winds (~4 m s^–1). No substantial temperature effects were observed with surface wind speed less than 1 m s^–1. Fluxes of sensible and latent heat from Lake Apopka were calculated from measurements of lake temperature, net radiation, relative humidity and air temperature above the lake. Bulk transfer coefficients and the Bowen ratio were calculated and found to be in agreement with reported data for non-advective conditions.IFAS Journal Series No. 1006.     

Data assimilation methods for estimating a heterogeneous conductivity field by assimilating transient solute transport data via ensemble Kalman filter

An ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is developed to identify a hydraulic conductivity distribution in a heterogeneous medium by assimilating solute concentration measurements of solute transport in the field with a steady‐state flow. A synthetic case with the mixed Neumann/Dirichlet boundary conditions is designed to investigate the capacity of the data assimilation methods to identify a conductivity distribution. The developed method is demonstrated in 2‐D transient solute transport with two different initial instant solute injection areas. The influences of the observation error and model error on the updated results are considered in this study. The study results indicate that the EnKF method will significantly improve the estimation of the hydraulic conductivity field by assimilating solute concentration measurements. The larger area of the initial distribution and the more observed data obtained, the better the calculation results. When the standard deviation of the observation error varies from 1% to 30% of the solute concentration measurements, the simulated results by the data assimilation method do not change much, which indicates that assimilation results are not very sensitive to the standard deviation of the observation error in this study. When the inflation factor is more than 1.0 to enlarge the model error by increasing the forecast error covariance matrix, the updated results of the hydraulic conductivity by the data assimilation method are not good at all. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Surface water resources for prehistoric peoples in western Papaguer?́a of the North American south-west

Water for personal use was a limiting factor for the prehistoric and historic indigenous peoples who inhabited the extremely arid North American region of south-western Arizona and north-western Sonora, known as Papaguer?́a. This paper lists and quantifies the perennial and intermittent water resources available to them. In the 16,824 km²study area of the Sonoran Desert, there were 128 waterholes, most of them in the mountains and, when full, these offered at least 3,099,141 l of water. At today's precipitation levels, virtually all points of the region were accessible to inhabitants within a 40 km radius of one or more water sources.     

Late Paleozoic orogeny in Alaska's Farewell terrane

Evidence is presented for a previously unrecognized late Paleozoic orogeny in two parts of Alaska's Farewell terrane, an event that has not entered into published scenarios for the assembly of Alaska. The Farewell terrane was long regarded as a piece of the early Paleozoic passive margin of western Canada, but is now thought, instead, to have lain between the Siberian and Laurentian (North American) cratons during the early Paleozoic. Evidence for a late Paleozoic orogeny comes from two belts located 100–200 km apart. In the northern belt, metamorphic rocks dated at 284–285 Ma (three ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar white-mica plateau ages) provide the main evidence for orogeny. The metamorphic rocks are interpreted as part of the hinterland of a late Paleozoic mountain belt, which we name the Browns Fork orogen. In the southern belt, thick accumulations of Pennsylvanian-Permian conglomerate and sandstone provide the main evidence for orogeny. These strata are interpreted as the eroded and deformed remnants of a late Paleozoic foreland basin, which we name the Dall Basin. We suggest that the Browns Fork orogen and Dall Basin comprise a matched pair formed during collision between the Farewell terrane and rocks to the west. The colliding object is largely buried beneath Late Cretaceous flysch to the west of the Farewell terrane, but may have included parts of the so-called Innoko terrane. The late Paleozoic convergent plate boundary represented by the Browns Fork orogen likely connected with other zones of plate convergence now located in Russia, elsewhere in Alaska, and in western Canada.     

A primer on upscaling tools for porous media

Over the last few decades a number of powerful approaches have been developed to intelligently reduce the number of degrees of freedom in very complex heterogeneous environs, e.g. mathematical homogenization, mixture and hybrid mixture theory, spatial averaging, moment methods, central limit or Martingale methods, stochastic-convective approaches, various other Eulerian and Lagrangian perturbation schemes, projection operators, renormalization group techniques, variational approaches, space transformational methods, continuous time random walks, and etc. In this article we briefly review many of these approaches as applied to specific examples in the hydrologic sciences.     

A New Magnetically Active Binary System Discovered in Yunnan-Hong Kong Wide Field Survey

We present a newly discovered magnetically active binary system detected by Yunnan-Hong Kong wide field survey, with an orbital period of 0.60286 days. Two color photometry for the system was performed using the 1 m Cassegrain telescope of Yunnan Observatories with its CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) camera. In the observed light curves, there are clearly different light maxima existed in the out-of-eclipse regions. We made spectroscopic observations for the binary system using the 2.4 m telescope and YFOSC (Yunnan Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera) of Lijiang station of Yunnan Observatories, China. The radial velocity curve was derived for primary star of the binary system. The primary star exhibited strong chromospheric activity, which confirms that the distortion of the light curves results from the starspot activity on the primary star. Through analyzing the light curves and RV (Radial Velocity) curve mentioned above by means of the W-D (Wilson-Devinney) code, orbital parameters and starspot configuration of the binary system are obtained. Finally, we have discussed the properties of the binary system, and given the prospects on the future work.     

Integration of Tracer Test Data to Refine Geostatistical Hydraulic Conductivity Fields Using Sequential Self-Calibration Method

On the basis of local measurements of hydraulic conductivity,geostatistical methods have been found to be useful in heterogeneity characterization of a hydraulic conductivity field on a regional scale. However,the methods are not suited to directly integrate dynamic production data,such as,hydraulic head and solute concentration,into the study of conductivity distribution. These data,which record the flow and transport processes in the medium,are closely related to the spatial distribution of hydraulic conductivity. In this study,a three-dimensional gradient-based inverse method-the sequential self-calibration (SSC) method-is developed to calibrate a hydraulic conductivity field,initially generated by a geostatistical simulation method,conditioned on tracer test results. The SSC method can honor both local hydraulic conductivity measurements and tracer test data. The mismatch between the simulated hydraulic conductivity field and the reference true one,measured by its mean square error (MSE),is reduced through the SSC conditional study. In comparison with the unconditional results,the SSC conditional study creates the mean breakthrough curve much closer to the reference true curve,and significantly reduces the prediction uncertainty of the solute transport in the observed locations. Further,the reduction of uncertainty is spatially dependent,which indicates that good locations,geological structure,and boundary conditions will affect the efficiency of the SSC study results.     

Assessment of radionuclide transport uncertainty in the unsaturated zone of Yucca Mountain

The present study assesses the uncertainty of flow and radionuclide transport in the unsaturated zone at Yucca Mountain using a Monte Carlo method. Matrix permeability, porosity, and sorption coefficient are considered random. Different from previous studies that assume distributions of the parameters, the distributions are determined in this study by applying comprehensive transformations and rigorous statistics to on-site measurements of the parameters. The distribution of permeability is further adjusted based on model calibration results. Correlation between matrix permeability and porosity is incorporated using the Latin Hypercube Sampling method. After conducting 200 Monte Carlo simulations of three-dimensional unsaturated flow and radionuclide transport for conservative and reactive tracers, the mean, variances, and 5th, 50th, and 95th percentiles for quantities of interest (e.g., matrix liquid saturation and water potential) are evaluated. The mean and 50th percentile are used as the mean predictions, and their associated predictive uncertainties are measured by the variances and the 5th and 95th percentiles (also known as uncertainty bounds). The mean predictions of matrix liquid saturation and water potential are in reasonable agreement with corresponding measurements. The uncertainty bounds include a large portion of the measurements, suggesting that the data variability can be partially explained by parameter uncertainty. The study illustrates propagation of predictive uncertainty of percolation flux, increasing downward from repository horizon to water table. Statistics from the breakthrough curves indicate that transport of the reactive tracer is delayed significantly by the sorption process, and prediction on the reactive tracer is of greater uncertainty than on the conservative tracer because randomness in the sorption coefficient increases the prediction uncertainty. Uncertainty in radionuclide transport is related to uncertainty in the percolation flux, suggesting that reducing the former entails reduction in the latter.