RURAL-TO-URBAN WATER TRANSFERS: MEASURING DIRECT FOREGONE BENEFITS OF IRRIGATION WATER UNDER UNCERTAIN WATER SUPPLIES

Irrigation water from a southeastern Colorado county has been sold to distant municipalities. The county's junior water right delivered limited and uncertain water supplies which were used on relatively poor soils. The ability of water markets to allocate water to the highest-valued use was addressed by assessing the direct foregone benefits of the transfer using deterministic and discrete stochastic sequential (DSSP) programming models. Crop mix predicted by the DSSP followed observed regional patterns. The DSSP was thus used to derive regional water demand from which foregone value was estimated. Direct regional foregone agricultural benefits were relatively low-due to uncertain water supplies and unproductive soils-indicating the market selected a low-valued supply for transfer.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Exploring the Revenue Mix of Nonprofit Organizations -- Does it Relate to Publicness

Nonprofit organizations offer a wide range of goods and services and seek funding from a variety of revenue sources. Our working theory n this paper is that the sources of funding are related to the services a nonprofit provides - specifically whether services are public, private, or mixed in the nature of their benefits. Using multiple subfields from three major fields in the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), this study divides nonprofits according to service type, and estimates the impact of service character on particular revenue streams and overall level of revenue diversification. Generally, the proportion of revenues generated by program fees is lowest for the category deemed public, highest for those with mostly private benefits, and midway for "mixed" services which are private in character but entail substantial public benefits. Similarly, the more public a nonprofit's services, the greater the proportion of revenues it generates through donations. However, we also identify some puzzling results that suggest the need for continued investigation of the determinants of the sources and mixes of nonprofit income. Working Paper 07-3

Investigation of generic hub fairing and pylon shapes to reduce hub drag

Reported are investigations of fairing configurations pointed toward substantially reducing hub drag. Experimental investigations have shown the importance of hub-fairing camber, lower-surface curvature, and relative size of the drag. The significance of pylon and hub fairings in combination have also been shown. Model test data presented here documented these findings, and also showed the effect of gaps and hub-fairing inclination angle on drag. From a drag standpoint, the best hub fairing had a circular arc, upper-surface curvature, a flat bottom surface, and 8.75% camber

AN EVALUATION OF THE 1981 FARM PROGRAM FOR CROPS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE 1985 FARM BILL

Agricultural and Food Policy,

An Efficient Targeting Strategy for Multiobject Spectrograph Surveys: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey "Tiling" Algorithm

Large surveys using multiobject spectrographs require automated methods for deciding how to efficiently point observations and how to assign targets to each pointing. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will observe around 10 6 spectra from targets distributed over an area of about 10,000 deg2, using a multiobject fiber spectrograph that can simultaneously observe 640 objects in a circular field of view (referred to as a "tile") 1°.49 in radius. No two fibers can be placed closer than 55Prime; during the same observation; multiple targets closer than this distance are said to "collide." We present here a method of allocating fibers to desired targets given a set of tile centers that includes the effects of collisions and that is nearly optimally efficient and uniform. Because of large-scale structure in the galaxy distribution (which form the bulk of the SDSS targets), a naive covering of the sky with equally spaced tiles does not yield uniform sampling. Thus, we present a heuristic for perturbing the centers of the tiles from the equally spaced distribution that provides more uniform completeness. For the SDSS sample, we can attain a sampling rate of greater than 92% for all targets, and greater than 99% for the set of targets that do not collide with each other, with an efficiency greater than 90% (defined as the fraction of available fibers assigned to targets). The methods used here may prove useful to those planning other large surveys

The Impact of Topographic Steepness on Tidal Dissipation at Bumpy Topography

Breaking internal waves are an important contributor to mixing in the stratified ocean interior. We use two-dimensional, nonhydrostatic numerical simulations to examine the breaking of internal waves generated by tidal flow over sinusoidal bottom topography. We explore the sensitivity of the internal wave breaking to the topographic steepness and Coriolis frequency, focusing on the vertical structure of kinetic energy dissipation and the ratio of local dissipation to the barotropic-to-baroclinic energy conversion. When the tidal frequency is twice the local Coriolis frequency, wave breaking above the topography is driven by wave–wave interactions which transfer wave energy from the tidal forcing frequency to the inertial frequency. The greater shear associated with the inertial frequency waves leads to enhanced dissipation in a thick layer above the topography. The topographic steepness strongly modulates this dependence of dissipation on Coriolis frequency; for some steep sinusoidal topographies, most wave energy propagates downward into the topographic troughs, eliminating the possibility for significant breaking above the topographic peaks. Current parameterizations of tidal dissipation in use in global ocean models need to be adapted to include the dependence of the local dissipation on both the Coriolis frequency and the topographic steepness

Economic impacts of a rural-to-urban water transfer: a case study of Crowley County, Colorado

November, 1993.Includes bibliographical references (pages 49-51).Urban water supply agencies seeking to meet growing municipal water demands in the arid southwest are finding that the purchase of water from existing agricultural uses is, from their perspective, often more cost-effective than construction of additional storage. Colorado municipalities have been among the most active purchasers of irrigation water rights. Agriculture-to-urban water transfers have economic impacts at the local, regional and state levels. Although the transfers represent "willing buyer-willing seller" exchanges, and represent a gain for both parties to the transactions, concerns have been voiced over whether the economic values of the transacting entities fully take into account the values to the region and the state. Starting in the 1970s, water for urban use has been purchased in Crowley County, a small rural county in southeastern Colorado. Crowley County lands are irrigated from the Lower Arkansas River via the Colorado Canal. Some 85% of the water rights formerly serving 47,000 irrigated acres in Crowley County have been purchased by municipalities. This study had two main purposes. The first was to employ a nonmarket valuation technique to estimate the foregone direct economic benefits (opportunity costs) of irrigation water used in Crowley County. The second purpose was to estimate regional (direct plus secondary) employment impacts of the reduced irrigated agriculture.Grant no. 14-08-0001-GI551, Project no. 06; financed in part by the U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Geological Survey, through the Colorado Water Resources Research Institute