3,858 research outputs found
Inception report on the Technical Assistance study (T.A. No. 1481-PAK): Crop based irrigation operations in the NWFP
Irrigation systems / Irrigation practices / Cropping systems / Water requirements / Pakistan
Assessing irrigation performance with comparative indicators: The case of the Alto Rio Lerma Irrigation District, Mexico
Irrigation management / Irrigation scheduling / Water allocation / Water distribution / Case studies / Institutional constraints / Operation / Monitoring / Indicators / Performance indexes / Water rights / Economic aspects / Data collection / Environmental effects / Performance evaluation / Water use efficiency
Impacts of Colombia's current irrigation management transfer program
Privatization / Irrigation management / Irrigated farming / Policy / Costs / Economic aspects / Operations / Maintenance / Agricultural production
Landsliding and its multiscale influence on mountainscapes
Landsliding is a complex process that modifies mountainscapes worldwide. Its severe and sometimes long-lasting negative effects contrast with the less-documented positive effects on ecosystems, raising numerous questions about the dual role of landsliding, the feedbacks between biotic and geomorphic processes, and, ultimately, the ecological and evolutionary responses of organisms. We present a conceptual model in which feedbacks between biotic and geomorphic processes, landslides, and ecosystem attributes are hypothesized to drive the dynamics of mountain ecosystems at multiple scales. This model is used to integrate and synthesize a rich, but fragmented, body of literature generated in different disciplines, and to highlight the need for profitable collaborations between biologists and geoscientists. Such efforts should help identify attributes that contribute to the resilience of mountain ecosystems, and also should help in conservation, restoration, and hazard assessment. Given the sensitivity of mountains to land-use and global climate change, these endeavors are both relevant and timel
Crop-based irrigation operations in the NWFP: Progress report no.2, Kharif 92 on the Technical Assistance Study, T.A. No.1481-PAK
Irrigation operation / Cropping systems / Irrigation canals / Water users' associations / Institutions / Pakistan
Mass Exchange Dynamics of Surface and Subsurface Oil in Shallow-Water Transport
We formulate a model for the mass exchange between oil at and below the sea
surface. This is a particularly important aspect of modeling oil spills.
Surface and subsurface oil have different chemical and transport
characteristics and lumping them together would compromise the accuracy of the
resulting model. Without observational or computational constraints, it is thus
not possible to quantitatively predict oil spills based upon partial field
observations of surface and/or sub-surface oil. The primary challenge in
capturing the mass exchange is that the principal mechanisms are on the
microscale. This is a serious barrier to developing practical models for oil
spills that are capable of addressing questions regarding the fate of oil at
the large spatio-temporal scales, as demanded by environmental questions. We
use upscaling to propose an environmental-scale model which incorporates the
mass exchange between surface and subsurface oil due to oil droplet dynamics,
buoyancy effects, and sea surface and subsurface mechanics. While the mass
exchange mechanism detailed here is generally applicable to oil transport
models, it addresses the modeling needs of a particular to an oil spill model
[1]. This transport model is designed to capture oil spills at very large
spatio-temporal scales. It accomplishes this goal by specializing to
shallow-water environments, in which depth averaging is a perfectly good
approximation for the flow, while at the same time retaining mass conservation
of oil over the whole oceanic domain.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure
Phase Transition for Glauber Dynamics for Independent Sets on Regular Trees
We study the effect of boundary conditions on the relaxation time of the
Glauber dynamics for the hard-core model on the tree. The hard-core model is
defined on the set of independent sets weighted by a parameter ,
called the activity. The Glauber dynamics is the Markov chain that updates a
randomly chosen vertex in each step. On the infinite tree with branching factor
, the hard-core model can be equivalently defined as a broadcasting process
with a parameter which is the positive solution to
, and vertices are occupied with probability
when their parent is unoccupied. This broadcasting process
undergoes a phase transition between the so-called reconstruction and
non-reconstruction regions at . Reconstruction has
been of considerable interest recently since it appears to be intimately
connected to the efficiency of local algorithms on locally tree-like graphs,
such as sparse random graphs. In this paper we show that the relaxation time of
the Glauber dynamics on regular -ary trees of height and
vertices, undergoes a phase transition around the reconstruction threshold. In
particular, we construct a boundary condition for which the relaxation time
slows down at the reconstruction threshold. More precisely, for any , for with any boundary condition, the relaxation time is
and . In contrast, above the reconstruction
threshold we show that for every , for ,
the relaxation time on with any boundary condition is , and we construct a boundary condition where the relaxation time is
Displacement Data Assimilation
We show that modifying a Bayesian data assimilation scheme by incorporating
kinematically-consistent displacement corrections produces a scheme that is
demonstrably better at estimating partially observed state vectors in a setting
where feature information important. While the displacement transformation is
not tied to any particular assimilation scheme, here we implement it within an
ensemble Kalman Filter and demonstrate its effectiveness in tracking
stochastically perturbed vortices.Comment: 26 Pages, 9 figures, 5 table
- …