Water Management for Kerian Irrigation Scheme Using Geographical Information System

A GIS-based model was developed to integrate the vast amounts of spatially distributed information of the Kerian Irrigation Scheme. The scheme has a command area of 24,000 ha, comprising eight compartments which is further subdivided into 28 blocks. The model requires the input of spatial and temporal information from various fields to compute irrigation deliveries for the upcoming period. It also runs periodic and seasonal monitoring and evaluation programs to improve water management of the scheme. The system permits display of information in the form of maps for easy visualization. The software Map Info Professional 4.5 was used to demonstrate the concepts and MapBasic Professional 4.5 programming language for the development of the user-interface tool. The scheduling program computes irrigation deliveries based on spatial and temporal demand of the paddy field by each compartment, block and Secondary Canal. The monitoring program gives information by compartment and by block at the end of each period on uniformity of water distribution to the field as well quantity to be delivered for the next period. The computed discharges were used to monitor the performance of irrigation delivery at the end of each period. Relative Water Supply (RWS), Water Use Efficiency (WUE), Cumulative Relative Water Supply (CRWS), Water Productivity Index (WPI) and Cropping Intensity (CI) have been used for monitoring and evaluation of the irrigation system performances. Hydro-climatological parameters like Evapotranspiration (ET), Effective Rainfall (ER), Irrigation Depth (IR) and Drainage Requirement (DR) also were computed. The post-season analysis provides weekly distribution of hydro-climatological parameters, irrigation delivery and performance by block. On a weekly basis, RWS and WUE were found to range from 1.01 to 2.24 and 45% to 99% respectively in the main season and 1.01 to 1.87 and 53.6% to 96.2% in the off season. The average values of RWS and WUE were found to be 1.53 and 68.15% in the main season and 1.33 and 78.5% in the off season respectively. The average values of WPI were also found to be 0.1267 and 0.2171 kg/m3 in the main season and off season respectively. The color-coded thematic maps were produced for the monitoring of seasonal yields and cropping intensity by block and compartment of the scheme. The user-interface technique for the irrigation system promises to provide comprehensive results along with new data sets and improve the decision-making processes in the operation and management of the scheme. The computed results are rapidly displayed allowing the manager to view maps, tables and graphs in a more comprehensive form, allowing time to make appropriate decision as the season progresses. This technique was found to be for improving the irrigation system management along with the actual feedback of the field information

Conceptual design of a test bed for miner rescue

Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2019In the mining industry, miners are constantly exposed to various safety and health hazards associated with often unpredictable conditions. When an accident occurs, it is difficult for the rescue team to come up with a proper plan for the rescue mission without having adequate knowledge of the situation. One possible approach to managing these hazards is to provide the rescue team with situational awareness such as real-time data regarding the environment (fire, poisonous or explosive gasses), as well as the location and physical condition of the trapped miners. Before starting the rescue mission, and in order to eliminate or reduce the dangers of exposing more humans to the explosive mining environment for information collection, a combination of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. In this project, a conceptual test bed is designed to collect one specific set of information about a trapped miner (in this case, heartrate data). This test bed collects the required data from a heart rate sensor on the trapped miner and transmits it wirelessly to a nearby UAV which will receive the data and send it back to the rescue team via a UGV

Rainfall-runoff models with fractional derivatives applied to kurau river basin, Perak, Malaysia

The 5th International Conference on Agricultural and Food Engineering (CAFEi) 2021Kurau River Basin (KRB), which covers an area of 322 km² and is the main drainage artery pouring into Bukit Merah Reservoir (BMR), is located in Perak State of Malaysia. The study of rainfall-runoff processes in KRB is important because BMR plays a vital role in rice production, flood control, ecosystems, and tourism in the region. This study proposes a new approach to rainfall-runoff modeling based on the fractional calculus. A dataset of daily rainfall and streamflow has been acquired. Then, the standard linear autoregressive with exogenous input (ARX) model is identified from the dataset in the sense of least square error. We consider the ARX model as a discretized differential equation with fractional orders. Such a model with fractional derivatives is versatile to represent hysteresis, which is intrinsically linked to the real runoff processes in tropical catchment basins like KRB

Development of a GIS Based Water Management Tool for a Large Scale Rice Irrigation Scheme

A GIS based model was developed to integrate the vast amounts of spatially distributed information from the Kerian Irrigation Scheme comprising eight compartments which are further subdivided into 28 blocks. The model consists of three modules. The "Scheduling" program computes irrigation deliveries based on spatial and temporal demand of the paddy field by each compartment, block or secondary canal. The "Monitoring" program gives information by compartment and by block on the uniformity of water distribution and the shortfall or excess. Relative Water Supply (RWS), Water Use Efficiency (WUE), Cumulative Relative Water Supply (CRWS), and Water Productivity Index (WPI) were computed by the "Evaluation" module. The post-season analysis uses weekly information on hydro-climatic parameters, irrigation delivery and irrigation indices by block within each compartment. On a weekly basis, RWS and WUE were found to range from 1.01 to 2.24 and 45% to 99% respectively in the main season and 1.01 to 1.87 and 53.57% to 96.15% respectively in the off season. The average values of RWS and WUE were found to be 1.53 and 68.15% in the main season and 1.33 and 78.47% in the off season respectively. The average values of WPI were also found to be 0.13 and 0.22 kg/m3 in the main season and off seasons respectively. Color-eoded thematic maps were produced for the monitoring of Seasonal Yields and Cropping Intensity (CI) by block and compartment of the scheme. The results are displayed allowing the manager to view maps, tables and graphs in a comprehensible form to ease decision making as the season progresses. This study would be useful to improve the irrigation system management based on feedback of field information

Irrigation management for rice using geographic information systems

Indicators and techniques of management system are important to evaluate the irrigation system. This study involves the evaluation of the management of an irrigation system spatially and temporally using Geographical Information Systems. It has great practical and application prospects, which can break down the single search method, and share graphics and databases and to present the results spatially on a map involved an efficient combination of information databases in rice irrigation system

Dam breach parameters and their influence on flood hydrographs for Mosul dam

Dams breach geometry prediction is crucial in dam break studies. The characteristics of flood hydrographs resulting from a dam breach essentially depend on the breach geometry and the required time for breach formation. To investigate the impact of breach parameters on maximum breaching outflows, five breach prediction approaches were implemented to calculate the flood hydrographs using HEC-RAS model, for Mosul dam. Numerous reservoir water levels for each approach were considered. Sensitivity analysis was carried out to evaluate the effect of each parameter on the resulting flood hydrographs. The time and value of peak discharge for each scenario were analysed and discussed. Results show that the most suitable method for estimating breach parameters for Mosul dam was the Froehlich approach. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis shows that the breach side slope does not affect the peak discharge time and has a minor influence on peak outflow values. Meanwhile, the required time for the breach to develop was highly sensitive to both peak discharge and peak discharge time

Geospatial Water Productivity Index (WPI) for rice

A GIS-based user-interface programme was developed to compute the geospatial Water Productivity Index (WPI) of a river-fed rice irrigation scheme in Northwest Selangor, Malaysia. The spatial analysis includes irrigation blocks with sizes ranging from 20 to 300 ha. The amount of daily water use for each irrigation block was determined using irrigation delivery model and stored in the database for both main season (August to December) and off season (February to May). After cut-off of the irrigation supply, a sub-module was used to compute the total water use including rainfall for each irrigation block. The rice yield data for both seasons were obtained from DOA (Department of Agriculture, Malaysia) of the scheme. Then, the Water Productivity Index (WPI) was computed for each irrigation block and spatial thematic map was also generated. ArcObjects and Visual Basic Application (VBA) programming languages were used to structure user-interface in the ArcGIS software. The WPI, expressed in terms of crop yield per unit amount of water used (irrigation and effective rainfall), ranged from 0.02 to 0.57 kg/m3in the main season and 0.02 to 0.40 in off season among irrigation blocks, respectively. The development of the overall system and the procedure are illustrated using the data obtained from the study area. The approach could be used to depict the gaps between the existing and appropriate water management practices. Suitable interventions could be made to fill the gaps and enhance water use efficiency at the field level and also help in saving irrigation water through remedial measures in the season. The approach could be useful for irrigation managers to rectify and enhance decision-making in both the management and operation of the next irrigation season

A modified empirical model for estimating the wetted zone dimensions under drip irrigation

Drip irrigation system has become one of the most common irrigation systems especially in arid and semi-arid regions due to its advantages in saving water. One of the most essential considerations in designing these systems is the dimensions of the wetted soil volume under emitters. These dimensions are significant in choosing the proper emitter spacing along the laterals and the suitable distance between laterals. In this study, a modified empirical equations for estimating the horizontal and vertical extend of the wetted zone under surface emitters were suggested. Data from published papers includes different conditions of soil properties and emitter discharge were used in deriving the empirical model using the nonlinear regression. The developed model has high value for coefficient of determination, R2. The results from the developed model were compared with results of other empirical models derived by other researchers. Some statistical criteria were used to evaluate the model performance which are the mean error ME, root mean square error RMSE, and model efficiency EF. The results revealed that the modified model showed good performance in predicting the wetted zone dimensions and it can be used in design and management of drip irrigation systems

Intracellular delivery of an antisense oligonucleotide via endocytosis of a G protein-coupled receptor

Gastrin-releasing peptide receptor (GRPR), a member of the G protein-coupled receptor superfamily, has been utilized for receptor-mediated targeting of imaging and therapeutic agents; here we extend its use to oligonucleotide delivery. A splice-shifting antisense oligonucleotide was conjugated to a bombesin (BBN) peptide, and its intracellular delivery was tested in GRPR expressing PC3 cells stably transfected with a luciferase gene interrupted by an abnormally spliced intron. The BBN-conjugate produced significantly higher luciferase expression compared to unmodified oligonucleotide, and this increase was reversed by excess BBN peptide. Kinetic studies revealed a combination of saturable, receptor-mediated endocytosis and non-saturable pinocytosis for uptake of the conjugate. The Km value for saturable uptake was similar to the EC50 value for the pharmacological response, indicating that receptor-mediated endocytosis was a primary contributor to the response. Use of pharmacological and molecular inhibitors of endocytosis showed that the conjugate utilized a clathrin-, actin- and dynamin-dependent pathway to enter PC3 cells. The BBN-conjugate partially localized in endomembrane vesicles that were associated with Rab7 or Rab9, demonstrating that it was transported to late endosomes and the trans-golgi network. These observations suggest that the BBN-oligonucleotide conjugate enters cells via a process of GRPR mediated endocytosis followed by trafficking to deep endomembrane compartments