Monitoring of Unregulated Contaminants in Public Water Systems

"This revised program would have significant monitoring burden reduction for ground water supplied systems as compared to the existing program."
"Note that the systems being monitored may total up to 3600, less than one-eighth the number under the existing program."     

Methods to Estimate Source Zone Depletion of Fuel Releases by Groundwater Flow

We compare two methods for estimating the natural source zone depletion (NSZD) rate at fuel release sites that occurs by groundwater flow through the source zone due to dissolution and transport of biodegradation products. Dissolution is addressed identically in both methods. The “mass budget method”, previously proposed and applied by others, estimates the petroleum hydrocarbon biodegradation rate based on dissolved electron acceptor delivery and dissolved biodegradation product removal by groundwater flow. The mass budget method relies on assumed stoichiometry for the degradation reactions and differences in concentrations of dissolved species (oxygen, nitrate, sulfate, reduced iron, reduced manganese, nonvolatile dissolved organic carbon, methane) at monitoring locations upgradient and downgradient of the source zone. We illustrate a refinement to account for degradation reactions associated with loss of reduced iron from solution. The “carbon budget method,” a simplification of approaches applied by others, addresses carbon‐containing species in solution or lost from solution (precipitated) and does not require assumptions about stoichiometry or information about electron acceptors. We apply both methods to a fuel release site with unusually detailed monitoring data and discuss applicability to more typical and less thoroughly monitored sites. The methods, as would typically be applied, yield similar results but have different constraints and uncertainties. Overall, we conclude that the carbon budget method has greater practical utility as it is simpler, requires fewer assumptions, accounts for most iron‐reducing reactions, and does not include CO₂ that escapes from the saturated to the unsaturated zone.     

Long‐Term Impacts on Groundwater and Reductive Dechlorination Following Bioremediation in a Highly Characterized Trichloroethene DNAPL Source Area

High‐resolution soil and groundwater monitoring was performed to assess the long‐term impacts of bioremediation using bioaugmentation with a dechlorinating microbial consortium (and sodium lactate as the electron donor) in a well‐characterized trichloroethene (TCE) dense nonaqueous phase liquid (DNAPL) source area. Monitoring was performed up to 3.7 years following active bioremediation using a high‐density monitoring network that included several discrete interval multi‐level sampling wells. Results showed that despite the absence of lactate, lactate fermentation transformation products, or hydrogen, biogeochemical conditions remained favorable for the reductive dechlorination of chlorinated ethenes. In locations where soil data showed that TCE DNAPL sources persisted, local contaminant rebound was observed in groundwater, whereas no rebound or continuous decreases in chlorinated ethenes were observed in locations where DNAPL sources were treated. While ethene levels measured 3.7 years after active treatment suggested relatively low (2 to 30%) dechlorination of the parent TCE and daughter products, carbon stable isotope analysis showed that the extent of complete dechlorination was much greater than indicated by ethene generation and that the estimated first‐order rate constant describing the complete dechlorination of TCE at 3.7 years following active bioremediation was approximately 3.6 y–1. Overall, results of this study suggest that biological processes may persist to treat TCE for years after cessation of active bioremediation, thereby serving as an important component of remedial treatment design and long‐term attenuation.     

Containment of Sources of Groundwater Contamination: Analysis of Mass Fluxes

Cutoff walls and liners are used frequently as barriers to isolate contaminants at both controlled and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites. Neville and Andrews (2006) presented a containment criterion for contaminant isolation by a barrier. The analysis of Neville and Andrews (2006) yields the inward Darcy flux that balances the diffusive mass flux from the source so that the net mass flux is zero. A requirement of zero net mass flux may not be achievable in all situations. The analysis developed by Neville and Andrews (2006) is extended to develop straightforward expressions for the long-term mass fluxes across a barrier for any conditions. In cases where it may not be possible to satisfy a criterion of zero net mass flux, the results from an exact solution for transient solute transport are used to show how the mass fluxes evolve to their long-term values.     

Investigation of flow-rainfall co-variation for catchments selected based on the two main sources of River Nile

The co-variation of rainfall and flow was assessed in four selected catchments of the River Nile which has two main sources including the White Nile (in the Equatorial region) and the Blue Nile (from the Ethiopian highlands). The selected catchments included Kyoga and Kagera (from the Equatorial region), as well as Blue Nile and Atbara (in Sudan and Ethiopia). In each catchment, the flow-rainfall co-variation was investigated at both seasonal and annual time scales. To explain aggregated variation at larger temporal scale while investigating the possible change in catchment behavior, which may interfere with the flow-rainfall relationship, rainfall-runoff modeling was done at daily time scale using data (falling within the period 1949–2003) from Kagera and Blue Nile i.e. the major catchment of each region where the River Nile emanates. Correlation analysis was conducted to assess how well the variation of flow and that of catchment-wide rainfall resonate. The co-occurrence of the changes in observed and simulated overland flow was examined using the quantile perturbation method (QPM). Trends in the model residuals were detected using the Mann–Kendal (MK) and cumulative rank difference (CRD) tests. The null hypothesis H ₀ (no correlation between rainfall and flow) was rejected at the significance level α of 5% for all the selected catchments. The temporal changes in terms of the QPM anomalies for both the observed and simulated flow were in a close agreement. The evidence to reject the H ₀ (no trend in the model residuals) was generally statistically insufficient at α = 5% for all the models and selected catchments considering both the MK and CRD tests. These results indicate that change in catchment behavior due to anthropogenic influence in the Nile basin over the selected time period was minimal. Thus, the overall rainfall-runoff generation processes of the catchments did not change in a significant way over the selected data period. The temporal flow variation could be attributed mainly to the rainfall variation.     

Performance of the LandSoil expert-based model to map erosion and sedimentation: application to a cultivated catchment in central Belgium

Intensive agricultural practices on sensitive soils induce high erosion rates in central Belgium. Expert-rules models quantify runoff and erosion at catchment scale, avoiding over-parameterization, and can include some direct or indirect connectivity features. The aim of this article is to test the ability of an expert-based model, LandSoil, to quantify runoff and to locate erosion and sedimentation areas in a small cultivated loamy catchment in Belgium during the years 2014, 2015 and 2016. Spatialized data are important for assessing model outputs and the erosive response. Measurements of runoff and observation of spatial erosion/deposition patterns, especially around major connectivity points, permitted an assessment of the reliability of the model results. Runoff modelling gave contrasting results (good linear adjustment at the outlet of the 83 ha sub-catchment (point 1): r² of 0.96, Nash–Sutcliffe criterion of 0.95; less good at the outlet of the 3.9 ha sub-catchment (point 2): r² of 0.28, Nash–Sutcliffe criterion of –0.47). For point 2 the poor results are explained by the very few runoff events observed, a scaling effect and the small area with a single land use. Graduated rulers demonstrate that the model is able to provide a coherent pattern of erosion/deposition. The study highlights great sensitivity to the effect of land use, land allocation, landscape design and slope gradients. Grass strips induce deposition of eroded particles when slopes are gentle (< 2%). Woodland strips decrease connectivity by being in the stream but deposit thinner sediment layers. Field boundaries have a role in the transport, but not really the quantity, of sediments. This model validation in the Belgian loess context allows us to use LandSoil in other similar environments in order to estimate the effects of landscape management scenarios. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gottfried Konecny:the ambassador of photogrammetry and remote sensing for 75 years

A 90th birthday would be a milestone celebration for any person,but exceptionally rare if the person is still active after 75 years of working and serving the photogrammetric and remote sensing communities worldwide.This unprecedented career is the motivation to reflect on the technological developments of the past 75 years in the light of Gottfried Konecny's lifetime achievements.I started to get to know Gottfried not long before he officially retired from the Institute for Photogrammetry and Engineering Surveys in 1998.Furthermore,I was not even born when he,as a young and talented scholar supported by the Fulbright Scholarship from the US Government,arrived at the Ohio State University(OSU),which has been my professional home for three decades.In the second half of Gottfried's 75-year career,the technological changes have been phenomenal,and,furthermore,shown an accelerating trend in the past few years.It is absolutely remarkable how Gottfried has been able to keep up with these rapid changes and advancing technologies and exploits them for mapping and,in general,for all the users of the geospatial field at large.Additionally,his open-minded and kind personality has been always a major plus to his technical skills and experiences,and ultimately helped him assist many colleagues to advance their careers,and along the way developed and increased the use of geospatial data and systems in support of many countries worldwide.     

Accuracy assessment of the National Geodetic Survey’s OPUS-RS utility

OPUS-RS is a rapid static form of the National Geodetic Survey’s On-line Positioning User Service (OPUS). Like OPUS, OPUS-RS accepts a user’s GPS tracking data and uses corresponding data from the U.S. Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) network to compute the 3-D positional coordinates of the user’s data-collection point called the rover. OPUS-RS uses a new processing engine, called RSGPS, which can generate coordinates with an accuracy of a few centimeters for data sets spanning as little as 15 min of time. OPUS-RS achieves such results by interpolating (or extrapolating) the atmospheric delays, measured at several CORS located within 250 km of the rover, to predict the atmospheric delays experienced at the rover. Consequently, standard errors of computed coordinates depend highly on the local geometry of the CORS network and on the distances between the rover and the local CORS. We introduce a unitless parameter called the interpolative dilution of precision (IDOP) to quantify the local geometry of the CORS network relative to the rover, and we quantify the standard errors of the coordinates, obtained via OPUS-RS, by using functions of the form