Urban hydroinformatics: past, present and future

This is the author accepted manuscriptHydroinformatics, as an interdisciplinary domain that blurs boundaries between water science, data science and computer science, is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. At the heart of this evolution, lies a continuous process of critical (self) appraisal of the discipline’s past, present and potential for further evolution, that creates a positive feedback loop between legacy, reality and aspirations. The power of this process is attested by the successful story of hydroinformatics thus far, which has arguably been able to mobilize wide ranging research and development and get the water sector more in tune with the digital revolution of the past 30 years. In this context, this paper attempts to trace the evolution of the discipline, from its computational hydraulics origins to its present focus on the complete socio-technical system, by providing at the same time, a functional framework to improve the understanding and highlight the links between different strands of the state-of-art hydroinformatic research and innovation. Building on this state-of-art landscape, the paper then attempts to provide an overview of key developments that are coming up, on the discipline’s horizon, focusing on developments relevant to urban water management, while at the same time, highlighting important legal, ethical and technical challenges that need to be addressed to ensure that the brightest aspects of this potential future are realized. Despite obvious limitations imposed by a single paper’s ability to report on such a diverse and dynamic field, it is hoped that this work contributes to a better understanding of both the current state of hydroinformatics and to a shared vision on the most exciting prospects for the future evolution of the discipline and the water sector it serves

Case report: hydroquinone and/or glutaraldehyde induced acute myeloid leukaemia?

BACKGROUND: Exposures to high doses of irradiation, to chemotherapy, benzene, petroleum products, paints, embalming fluids, ethylene oxide, herbicides, pesticides, and smoking have been associated with an increased risk of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Although there in no epidemiological evidence of relation between X-ray developer, fixer and replenisher liquids and AML, these included glutaraldehyde which has weakly associated with lymphocytic leukemia in rats and hydroquinone has been increasingly implicated in producing leukemia, causing DNA and chromosomal damage, inhibits topo-isomerase II, alter hematopoiesis and inhibit apoptosis of neoplastic cells. CASE PRESENTATION: Two white females (A and B) hired in 1985 as medical radiation technologists in a primary care center, in Greece. In July 2001, woman A, 38-years-old, was diagnosed as having acute monocytic leukaemia (FAB M5). The patient did not respond to therapy and died threeweeks later. In August 2001, woman B, 35-year-old, was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukaemia (FAB M3). Since discharge, she is in continuous complete remission. Both women were non smokers without any medical history. Shortly after these incidents official inspectors and experts inspected workplace, examined equipment, archives of repairs, notes, interviewed and monitored employees. They concluded that shielding was inadequate for balcony's door but personal monitoring did not show any exceeding of TLV of 20 mSv yearly and cytogenetics analysis did not reveal findings considered to be characteristics of ionizing exposure. Equipment for developing photos had a long list of repairs, mainly leakages of liquids and increases of temperature. On several occasions the floor has been flooded especially during 1987–1993 and 1997–2001. Inspection confirmed a complete lack of ventilation and many spoiled medical x-ray films. Employees reported that an "osmic" level was continuously evident and frequently developed symptoms of respiratory irritation and dizziness. CONCLUSION: The findings support the hypothesis that the specific AML cases might have originated from exposure to chemicals, especially hydroquinone and/or glutaraldehyde. The report also emphasises the crucial role of inspection of facilities and enforcement of compliance with regulations in order to prevent similar incidents

An integrated system dynamics - Cellular automata model for distributed water-infrastructure planning

PublishedJournal ArticleThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IWA Publishing via the DOI in this record.© IWA Publishing 2016.Modern distributed water-Aware technologies (including, for example, greywater recycling and rainwater harvesting) enable water reuse at the scale of household or neighbourhood. Nevertheless, even though these technologies are, in some cases, economically advantageous, they have a significant handicap compared to the centralized urban water management options: It is not easy to estimate a priori the extent and the rate of the technology spread. This disadvantage is amplified in the case of additional uncertainty due to expansion of an urban area. This overall incertitude is one of the basic reasons the stakeholders involved in urban water are sceptical about the distributed technologies, even in the cases where these appear to have lower cost. In this study, we suggest a methodology that attempts to cope with this uncertainty by coupling a cellular automata (CA) and a system dynamics (SD) model. The CA model is used to create scenarios of urban expansion including the suitability of installing water-Aware technologies for each new urban area. Then, the SD model is used to estimate the adoption rate of the technologies. Various scenarios based on different economic conditions and water prices are assessed. The suggested methodology is applied to an urban area in Attica, Greece.This research has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund– ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) - Research Funding Program: THALES. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund. Hydropolis: Urban development and water infrastructure - Towards innovative decentralized urban water management

Urban water modelling and the daily time step: issues for a realistic representation

Interest in modelling the total Urban Water Cycle is increasing, due to the realisation of the need for (high-level) flow integration to address issues of recycling, re-use and ultimately sustainability. Urban Water Cycle models are generally operating on a daily time step due to the inherent strategic/planning nature of such work. However, the choice of time step implies (more or less hidden) assumptions which may influence significantly the model’s performance. One such assumption – the way in which water tanks (e.g. rainwater, greywater, greenwater etc) are operated in terms of the sequence between tank overflow (spill) and water extracted from the tank for use (yield) is investigated in this paper. The two alternative sequences are termed here Yield After Spill (YAS) and Yield Before Spill (YBS). The Urban Water Optioneering Tool was used and advantages and disadvantages of these sequences were examined. The paper reviews the differences under a series of technological configurations and draws recommendations for modelling practice. It is suggested that YAS/YBS schemes have different impacts depending on the technological configuration of the case study under investigation, but that under normal operating conditions, daily time step simulations with YBS schemes tend to result in tank sizes that are (marginally) closer to sizes obtained by hourly time-steps. It is however suggested that YAS schemes should be preferred when the parameter of interest is runoff

A rainfall disaggregation scheme for sub-hourly time scales: coupling a Bartlett-Lewis based model with adjusting procedures

Many hydrological applications, such as flood studies, require the use of long rainfall data at fine time scales varying from daily down to 1 min time step. However, in the real world there is limited availability of data at sub-hourly scales. To cope with this issue, stochastic disaggregation techniques are typically employed to produce possible, statistically consistent, rainfall events that aggregate up to the field data collected at coarser scales. A methodology for the stochastic disaggregation of rainfall at fine time scales was recently introduced, combining the Bartlett-Lewis process to generate rainfall events along with adjusting procedures to modify the lower-level variables (i.e., hourly) so as to be consistent with the higher-level one (i.e., daily). In the present paper, we extend the aforementioned scheme, initially designed and tested for the disaggregation of daily rainfall into hourly depths, for any sub-hourly time scale. In addition, we take advantage of the recent developments in Poisson-cluster processes incorporating in the methodology a Bartlett-Lewis model variant that introduces dependence between cell intensity and duration in order to capture the variability of rainfall at sub-hourly time scales. The disaggregation scheme is implemented in an R package, named HyetosMinute, to support disaggregation from daily down to 1-min time scale. The applicability of the methodology was assessed on a 5-min rainfall records collected in Bochum, Germany, comparing the performance of the above mentioned model variant against the original Bartlett-Lewis process (non-random with 5 parameters). The analysis shows that the disaggregation process reproduces adequately the most important statistical characteristics of rainfall at wide range of time scales, while the introduction of the model with dependent intensity-duration results in a better performance in terms of skewness, rainfall extremes and dry proportions

Pipe burst diagnostics using evidence theory

Copyright © IWA Publishing 2011.The definitive peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Journal of Hydroinformatics Volume 13 Issue 4, pp. 596–608 (2011), DOI: 10.2166/hydro.2010.201 and is available at www.iwapublishing.com.This paper presents a decision support methodology aimed at assisting Water Distribution System (WDS) operators in the timely location of pipe bursts. This will enable them to react more systematically and promptly. The information gathered from various data sources to help locate where a pipe burst might have occurred is frequently conflicting and imperfect. The methodology developed in this paper deals effectively with such information sources. The raw data collected in the field is first processed by means of several models, namely the pipe burst prediction model, the hydraulic model and the customer contacts model. The Dempster–Shafer Theory of Evidence is then used to combine the outputs of these models with the aim of increasing the certainty of determining the location of a pipe burst within a WDS. This new methodology has been applied to several semi-real case studies. The results obtained demonstrate that the method shows potential for locating the area of a pipe burst by capturing the varying credibility of the individual models based on their historical performance

WaterMet2 model functional requirements

© TRUST 2012This report specifies the functional requirements of the WaterMet2 Model that will be developed to quantify the generic Urban Water System (UWS) metabolism based performance model in the TRUST project (TRansitions to the Urban water Services of Tomorrow). The report is not a project deliverable but rather a work-in-progress to describe different aspects of the model and its functionality. This report addresses two main parts of the WaterMet2 Model functionality. The first part illustrates principal concepts of WaterMet2 modelling as a mass balance base model. Two main aspects of water modelling (i.e. quantity and quality modelling approaches) are described and analysed first. Modelling of the intended risk analysis as one of the purpose of TRUST project is demonstrated. Then, the spatial and temporal scales of the model are better described as well as a brief description of intervention modelling. Second part of the report presents the specific indicators of the WaterMet2 model in three parts: (1) performance indicators linked to all water related flows in the UWS; (2) risk indicators based on the current data received from WA32; and (3) cost indicators including capital and operational ones. For all introduced indicators, the relevant input data requirements are presented. Finally, the model calibration approach is briefly described. This document is based on the authors' current best understanding of the UWS metabolism concept and the associated performance related issues. Therefore, as WaterMet2 model progresses in more details, information presented in this report is likely to evolve and improv

The Nile Water-Food-Energy Nexus under Uncertainty: Impacts of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ASCE via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: All data, models, code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.Achieving a water, food, and energy (WFE) nexus balance through policy interventions is challenging in a transboundary river basin because of the dynamic nature and intersectoral complexity that may cross borders. The Nile basin is shared by a number of riparian countries and is currently experiencing rapid population and economic growth. This has sparked new developments to meet the growing water, food, and energy demands, alleviate poverty, and improve the livelihood in the basin. Such developments could result in basinwide cooperation or trigger conflicts among the riparian countries. A system dynamics model was developed for the entire Nile basin and integrated with the food and energy sectors in Egypt to investigate the future of the WFE nexus with and without the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) during filling and subsequent operation using basinwide stochastically generated flows. Different filling rates from 10% to 100% of the average monthly flow are considered during the filling process. Results suggest that the GERD filling and operation would affect the WFE nexus in Egypt, with the impact likely to be significant if the filling process occurred during a dry period. Food production from irrigated agriculture would be reduced by 9%–19% during filling and by about 4% during GERD operation compared with the case without it. The irrigation water supply and hydropower generation in Sudan will be reduced during the filling phase of the GERD, but this is expected to be improved during the dam operation phase as a result of the regulation afforded by the GERD. Ethiopian hydropower generation is expected to be boosted by the GERD during the filling and operation of the dam, adding an average of 15,000  GWh/year once GERD comes online. Lastly, the results reveal the urgency of cooperation and coordination among the riparian countries to minimize the regional risks and maximize the regional rewards associated with the GERD.Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE), EgyptUniversity of Exete