Water balance complexities in ephemeral catchments with different land uses: Insights from monitoring and distributed hydrologic modeling

Although ephemeral catchments are widespread in arid and semiarid climates, the relationship of their water balance with climate, geology, topography, and land cover is poorly known. Here we use 4 years (2011–2014) of rainfall, streamflow, and groundwater level measurements to estimate the water balance components in two adjacent ephemeral catchments in south-eastern Australia, with one catchment planted with young eucalypts and the other dedicated to grazing pasture. To corroborate the interpretation of the observations, the physically based hydrological model CATHY was calibrated and validated against the data in the two catchments. The estimated water balances showed that despite a significant decline in groundwater level and greater evapotranspiration in the eucalypt catchment (104–119% of rainfall) compared with the pasture catchment (95–104% of rainfall), streamflow consistently accounted for 1–4% of rainfall in both catchments for the entire study period. Streamflow in the two catchments was mostly driven by the rainfall regime, particularly rainfall frequency (i.e., the number of rain days per year), while the downslope orientation of the plantation furrows also promoted runoff. With minimum calibration, the model was able to adequately reproduce the periods of flow in both catchments in all years. Although streamflow and groundwater levels were better reproduced in the pasture than in the plantation, model-computed water balance terms confirmed the estimates from the observations in both catchments. Overall, the interplay of climate, topography, and geology seems to overshadow the effect of land use in the study catchments, indicating that the management of ephemeral catchments remains highly challenging

Student-To-Student Sexual Harassment: Legal Bases For School District And Individual Liability

Student-To-Student Sexual Harassment: Legal Bases For School District And Individual Liabilit

Efficient piecewise linear classifiers and applications

Supervised learning has become an essential part of data mining for industry, military, science and academia. Classification, a type of supervised learning allows a machine to learn from data to then predict certain behaviours, variables or outcomes. Classification can be used to solve many problems including the detection of malignant cancers, potentially bad creditors and even enabling autonomy in robots. The ability to collect and store large amounts of data has increased significantly over the past few decades. However, the ability of classification techniques to deal with large scale data has not been matched. Many data transformation and reduction schemes have been tried with mixed success. This problem is further exacerbated when dealing with real time classification in embedded systems. The real time classifier must classify using only limited processing, memory and power resources. Piecewise linear boundaries are known to provide efficient real time classifiers. They have low memory requirements, require little processing effort, are parameterless and classify in real time. Piecewise linear functions are used to approximate non-linear decision boundaries between pattern classes. Finding these piecewise linear boundaries is a difficult optimization problem that can require a long training time. Multiple optimization approaches have been used for real time classification, but can lead to suboptimal piecewise linear boundaries. This thesis develops three real time piecewise linear classifiers that deal with large scale data. Each classifier uses a single optimization algorithm in conjunction with an incremental approach that reduces the number of points as the decision boundaries are built. Two of the classifiers further reduce complexity by augmenting the incremental approach with additional schemes. One scheme uses hyperboxes to identify points inside the so-called “indeterminate” regions. The other uses a polyhedral conic set to identify data points lying on or close to the boundary. All other points are excluded from the process of building the decision boundaries. The three classifiers are applied to real time data classification problems and the results of numerical experiments on real world data sets are reported. These results demonstrate that the new classifiers require a reasonable training time and their test set accuracy is consistently good on most data sets compared with current state of the art classifiers.Doctor of Philosoph

The Variable Stars and Blue Horizontal Branch of the Metal-Rich Globular Cluster NGC 6441

We present time-series VI photometry of the metal-rich ([Fe/H] = -0.53) globular cluster NGC 6441. Our color-magnitude diagram shows that the extended blue horizontal branch seen in Hubble Space Telescope data exists in the outermost reaches of the cluster. The red clump slopes nearly parallel to the reddening vector. A component of this slope is due to differential reddening, but part is intrinsic. The blue horizontal branch stars are more centrally concentrated than the red clump stars. We have discovered about 50 new variable stars near NGC 6441, among them eight or more RR Lyrae stars which are very probably cluster members. Comprehensive period searches over the range 0.2-1.0 days yielded unusually long periods (0.5-0.9 days) for the fundamental pulsators compared with field RR Lyrae of the same metallicity. Three similar long-period RR Lyrae are known in other metal-rich globulars. With over ten examples in hand, it seems that a distinct sub-class of RR Lyrae is emerging. The observed properties of the horizontal branch stars are in reasonable agreement with recent models which invoke deep mixing to enhance the atmospheric helium abundance, while they conflict with models which assume high initial helium abundance. The light curves of the c-type RR Lyrae seem to have unusually long rise times and sharp minima. Reproducing these light curves in stellar pulsation models may provide another means of constraining the physical variables responsible for the anomalous blue horizontal branch extension and sloped red clump observed in NGC 6441.Comment: 30 pages plus 6 EPS and 6 JPEG figures; uses AAS TeX. Accepted by the Astronomical Journal. Minor changes include computing He abundance, modifications to Figs 1 and 8, and expansion on idea that blue HB stars may be produced in binarie