Integrated Urban Water Resources Modeling In A Semi-Arid Mountainous Region Using A Cyber-Infrastructure Framework

Water resources management in cities is facing growing challenges related to increases in water demand, uncertain future climate variability, and conflicts related to water rights and access. Integrated water resource management (IWRM) is an inter-disciplinary framework which connects separated infrastructures and elements of a water resource system together which have dynamic interconnection. An IWRM process broadly involves water supply systems, stormwater management, wastewater collection, climate variables, groundwater and other water related sectors to solve the water and environmental problems. In this study, an integrated framework applying the GoldSim Monte-Carlo simulation software is presented to provide dynamic simulation of inter-related parts of an urban water system. The framework supports fast access and application of data resources, exchange of data among sub-models, and capacity to produce long-term simulations with sufficiently high spatial resolution to support urban water management research. Also parts of the framework are web-based interface, results analysis, and visualization tools. Working with local water managers the framework has been designed to provide specific and useful information for stakeholders, water managers and researchers to answer location-specific questions related to water availability, stormwater management, and other aspects. It also has the potential to provide exploratory opportunities for community and K-12 education. This paper describes the framework and presents an analysis of decentralized versus centralized urban water management solutions for the Salt Lake City metropolitan area in Utah, USA

Impacts of Large-Scale Stormwater Green Infrastructure Implementation and Climate Variability on Receiving Water Response in the Salt Lake City Area

This study evaluated impacts of Green Infrastructure (GI) as a stormwater management practice on return flows and the further Implications of climate variability. The goal was to create a model to explore the impacts that bioretention and Rainwater Harvesting (RWH) representing GI had using goldsim and Stormwater Management Modeling (SWMM) software. The software was used to represent impacts that climate variability individually and combined, may have on downstream stakeholders and receiving water systems in Salt Lake city, Utah, USA. Primary stakeholders included downstream water rights users, Farmington Bay waterfowl management area and the migratory birds that rely on Farmington Bay and the advocates that represent them. The steps to reach this goal were broken down incrementally to: (1) Characterize daily inflows to Farmington Bay, (2) Provide daily inflows from natural and urban runoff to the Jordan river, (3) Create a daily water balance model of Farmington Bay, (4) Demonstrate the model with and without stormwater GI and climate variability scenarios and (5) Determine trends of inflow to the Jordan River, duck clubs and Farmington Bay under various scenarios. The simulation results demonstrated that bioretention and RWH individually and combined had minimal impact on downstream water users, Jordan River flows and ultimately Farmington Bay water levels. Bioretention reduced the flow in the Jordan River minimally, with reductions primarily during peak flow. RWH actually kept more water in the natural system on average because less water was needed from the water treatment facilities when outdoor irrigation was supplemented with rainwater. The user reliability did not differ for any of the bioretention and RWH scenarios. The climate variability scenario had the greatest impact to Jordan River flows, Farmington Bay water levels and user reliability. When analyzed without GI implementation, the climate variability induced reduction in tributary flows and precipitation led to an average decrease of 11% in the Jordan River streamflow when compared to average baseline scenario over a 25 year simulation. The user reliability decreased by 5% and most importantly there was found to be an average of 36% decrease in the water levels in Farmington Bay. The resultant of the decrease in Farmington Bay water level is a loss of up to 61 square kilometers (15,000 acres) of open bay that would impact bird habitat, brine shrimp grounds, recreationalists, bird watchers, hunters and more. For this case study the implications of climate variability on the water system are much greater than implementing GI

Time-thieves and Bottlenecks in the Norwegian Construction Projects

AbstractUtilizing time effectively and efficiently is one of the important factors that can determine the success of achieving desired results of projects. Nevertheless, several projects come across delays and unnecessary use of time due to various reasons, and hence suffer from unfavorable consequences. Construction industry is not exceptional. There are elements that “steal” time in construction projects; and, there are bottlenecks that cause delays. This paper will present the first findings from the SpeedUp project survey conducted in seven public and private organizations in autumn 2014 in Norway. The purpose with the study was to establish –what arethe most common factors extending project life cycle or makingproject going slower than planned. We have conducted a broad literature review that aimed to establish – what are the most common delays factors mentioned in the literature and the result from the literature review has been analyzed against our data from the survey. This paper will present the ten most common “time-thieves” and “bottlenecks”revealed in the SpeedUpproject survey. It willidentify the major “time-thieves” and “bottlenecks”seen from owners, consultants and contractors views.This identification can be seen as a mapping process that will lead to find out possible causes as well as possible efforts, those can be carried out in order to deal with slow pace and delays in construction projects. This study on “time-thieves” and “bottlenecks” in the construction industry will contribute to shade light on important improvements areas for the construction industry

Using inertial measurement units to identify medio-lateral ground reaction forces due to walking and swaying

Horizontal ground reaction forces (GRFs) due to human walking and swaying have been investigated (respectively) through direct measurements using a treadmill and a set of force plates. These GRFs have also been measured (or estimated) indirectly using acceleration data provided by inertial measurement units (IMUs). One motivation for this research has been the lack of published data on these two forms of loading that are generated by movements of the human body in the medio-lateral plane perpendicular to the direction of walking or the direction faced during swaying. The other motivation, following from successful developments in applying IMUs to in-situ vertical GRF measurements, has been to identify best practice for estimating medio-lateral GRFs outside the constraints of a laboratory. Examination of 852 treadmill measurements shows that medio-lateral GRFs at the first sub-harmonic of pacing rate can exceed 10% of body weight. Using a smaller and more recent set of measurements including motion capture, it has been shown that IMUs can be used to reconstruct these GRFs using a linear combination of body accelerations at each of the lower back and sternum positions. There are a number of potential applications for this capability yet to be explored, in particular relating to footbridge performance. A separate set of measurements using force plates has shown that harmonic components of medio-lateral dynamic load factors due to on the spot swaying can approach 50% of body weight. Such forces provide a capability to excite horizontal vibration modes of large civil structures with frequencies below 2 Hz that are problematic for mechanical excitation. As with walking, the ability to use IMUs to estimate medio-lateral swaying GRFs outside laboratory constraints has been demonstrated. As for walking a pair of IMUs is needed, but the best linear combination varies strongly between individuals, according to swaying style. In-situ application of indirect measurement has been successfully demonstrated through a very challenging application of system identification of a multi-storey building, including estimation of modal mass.</p

Propositions for Examining the Seasonality Construct in Tourism Settings

Propositions for Examining the Seasonality Construct in Tourism Settings Abstract The purpose of this conceptual study is to further develop our understanding of the seasonality construct as a predictor of tourist behavior. This study aims to explain and organize the tourism seasonality literature for a more thorough interpretation; examine how seasonality impacts consumer decision making focusing on the use of inbound and outbound marketing; and establish measurement tools that can help link seasonal destination consumer needs with actual behavior and internet search behavior. The contribution of this study is several thoroughly developed propositions to be used as a guide in further seasonality literature focusing on the measurement of the seasonality construct, specifically the tools to be utilized in seasonality empirical research; the types of seasonality as connected to traveler decision-making; the relationship between traveler search behavior, actual behavior, and seasonal changes; and the organization of seasonal terms in relation to seasonal activity

Galaxy blending effects in deep imaging cosmic shear probes of cosmology

Upcoming deep imaging surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time will be confronted with challenges that come with increased depth. One of the leading systematic errors in deep surveys is the blending of objects due to higher surface density in the more crowded images; a considerable fraction of the galaxies which we hope to use for cosmology analyses will overlap each other on the observed sky. In order to investigate these challenges, we emulate blending in a mock catalogue consisting of galaxies at a depth equivalent to 1.3 years of the full 10-year Rubin Observatory that includes effects due to weak lensing, ground-based seeing, and the uncertainties due to extraction of catalogues from imaging data. The emulated catalogue indicates that approximately 12% of the observed galaxies are "unrecognized" blends that contain two or more objects but are detected as one. Using the positions and shears of half a billion distant galaxies, we compute shear-shear correlation functions after selecting tomographic samples in terms of both spectroscopic and photometric redshift bins. We examine the sensitivity of the cosmological parameter estimation to unrecognized blending employing both jackknife and analytical Gaussian covariance estimators. A $\sim0.02$ decrease in the derived structure growth parameter $S_8 = \sigma_8 (\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.5}$ is seen due to unrecognized blending in both tomographies with a slight additional bias for the photo-$z$-based tomography. This bias is about 2$\sigma$ statistical error in measuring $S_8$.Comment: 22 pages, 23 figures. This paper has undergone internal review in the LSST DESC. Submitted to MNRA

Extremum seeking control of quantum gates

To be useful for quantum computation, gate operations must be maintained at high fidelities over long periods of time. In addition to decoherence, slow drifts in control hardware leads to inaccurate gates, causing the quality of operation of as-built quantum computers to vary over time. Here, we demonstrate a data-driven approach to stabilized control, combining extremum-seeking control (ESC) with direct randomized benchmarking (DRB) to stabilize two-qubit gates under unknown control parameter fluctuations. As a case study, we consider these control strategies in the context of a trapped ion quantum computer using physically-realistic simulation. We then experimentally demonstrate this control strategy on a state-of-the-art, commercial trapped-ion quantum computer.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

Zero-shot Audio Topic Reranking using Large Language Models

The Multimodal Video Search by Examples (MVSE) project investigates using video clips as the query term for information retrieval, rather than the more traditional text query. This enables far richer search modalities such as images, speaker, content, topic, and emotion. A key element for this process is highly rapid, flexible, search to support large archives, which in MVSE is facilitated by representing video attributes by embeddings. This work aims to mitigate any performance loss from this rapid archive search by examining reranking approaches. In particular, zero-shot reranking methods using large language models are investigated as these are applicable to any video archive audio content. Performance is evaluated for topic-based retrieval on a publicly available video archive, the BBC Rewind corpus. Results demonstrate that reranking can achieve improved retrieval ranking without the need for any task-specific training data