83 research outputs found
Comparison and Validation of Several Open Access Remotely Sensed Rainfall Products for the Nile Basin
No full textResearches about the water cycle are done very often and are very effective to improve the efficiency of the water usage for a basin. Especially in water scarce areas, this type of research are wanted. Water scarcity occurs when water supply cannot meet the water demand. More than half of the world will experience physical or economic water problems in 2025. More insight in rainfall statistics can reduce the water scarcity problems due to better planning of storage, retention, allocation, distribution and consumptive use. A tool to quantify the efficiency is with the Water Accounting framework. But this framework requires accurate rainfall data. Because rainfall ground measurements are not available all over the world one has to look for other data sources for a large part of the world. For those areas, remote sensing rainfall products can offer good rainfall estimations for those basins. But with several ground measurements on the market the question is which of the open access remote sensed rainfall products is the most accurate? In this research 13 remote sensed rainfall product are validated and compared for the Nile Basin for a yearly and a monthly temporal resolution between 2000 and 2010. Also a 14th product is made with the use of the relative errors estimated with the triple collocation method. The results showed that the CHIRPS v1.8 product has the best correlation and root mean squared error, and the TRMM 3B43 product showed the best bias.Water ResourcesGeoscience & EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience
Ecology of Living Together: Equilibrium between humans & species in the built environment
No full textIn the Advanced Housing Design Studio we explored how housing design can successfully address the challenge of reducing the ecological footprint of its residents and assure social inclusion. In this studio an emphasis was put on the housing concept of collective living. A cooperative housing concept that offers the opportunity to create a living environment that meets the needs and wishes of the future dwellers and encourages the use of shared and collective spaces.My experiment in this studio was finding an equilibrium, a balance between different household types with different habitational needs in an existing monotonous block. For my research I looked into a way of placing the different household types or one can say social groups together without causing an unpleasant living environment. Whilst on the contrary bolster a close-knit and sustainable community.Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Advanced Housing Desig
Water and productivity accounting using WA+ framework for sustainable water resources management : Case study of northwestern Iran
No full textAn exhaustive evaluation of water resources is a prerequisite for evidence-informed planning and implementing sustainable management strategies. However, the lack of sufficient information on water supply and consumption, alongside the technical limitations on comprehensive accounting for inter-relations and interactions between the subsystems, has resulted in decisions with often long-lasting outcomes and undesirable consequences. Water accounting is a tool for systematic acquisition, analysis, and reporting of water-related information to fill the existing knowledge gap on water flows and fluxes. In this study, Water Accounting Plus (WA+) framework is applied to the western region of Lake Urmia, a dying hyper-saline lake, to assess water use and crop water productivity (CWP) from 2010 to 2016. Remotely sensed information along with a distributed hydrological model (SPHY) is used to fill the information gap on water resources and inform effective policy actions. Our analysis reveals that the agricultural sector is neither productive nor efficient while there is a considerable scope to ameliorate water productivity and beneficial water use by adopting proper water management practices. Average CWP values for wheat, sugarbeet, vineyard, and apple vary between 0.38 and 0.55, 5.1–5.6, 1.5–1.7 and 1.9–2.3 (kg/m3), respectively while storage changes show consistent depletion, especially during dry year, up to 117 MCM. The results indicate that a 40% reduction in blue water use is achievable to supply additional water to revive Lake Urmia. This study highlights the importance of water accounting and information flow for decision-makers, practitioners, and farming communities to define practical targets and enhance productivity in water-scarce regions
The Zone of Proximal Development of Psychological Assessment
No full textIn this chapter the author makes some critical comments on research on dynamic assessment and discusses the advancements, especially in modern measurement theory and computers, that allow researchers to construct better dynamic assessment instruments
Spatiotemporal assessment of irrigation performance of the Kou Valley Irrigation Scheme in Burkina Faso using satellite remote sensing-derived indicators
No full textTraditional methods based on field campaigns are generally used to assess the performance of irrigation schemes in Burkina Faso, resulting in labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly processes. Despite their extensive application for such performance assessment, remote sensing (RS)-based approaches remain very much underutilized in Burkina Faso. Using multi-temporal Landsat images within the Python module for the Surface Energy Balance Algorithm for Land model, we investigated the spatiotemporal performance patterns of the Kou Valley irrigation scheme (KVIS) during two consecutive cropping seasons. Four performance indicators (depleted fraction, relative evapotranspiration, uniformity of water consumption, and crop water productivity) for rice, maize, and sweet potato were calculated and compared against standard values. Overall, the performance of the KVIS varied depending on year, crop, and the crop’s geographical position in the irrigation scheme. A gradient of spatially varied relative evapotranspiration was observed across the scheme, with the uniformity of water consumption being fair to good. Although rice was the most cultivated, a shift to more sweet potato farming could be adopted to benefit more from irrigation, given the relatively good performance achieved by this crop. Our findings ascertain the potential of such RS-based cost-effective methodologies to serve as basis for improved irrigation water management in decision support tools
Crop Water Productivity Mapping and Benchmarking Using Remote Sensing and Google Earth Engine Cloud Computing
No full textScarce water resources present a major hindrance to ensuring food security. Crop water productivity (WP), embraced as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is playing an integral role in the performance-based evaluation of agricultural systems and securing sustainable food production. This study aims at developing a cloud-based model within the Google Earth Engine (GEE) based on Landsat -7 and -8 satellite imagery to facilitate WP mapping at regional scales (30-m resolution) and analyzing the state of the water use efficiency and productivity of the agricultural sector as a means of benchmarking its WP and defining local gaps and targets at spatiotemporal scales. The model was tested in three major agricultural districts in the Lake Urmia Basin (LUB) with respect to five crop types, including irrigated wheat, rainfed wheat, apples, grapes, alfalfa, and sugar beets as the major grown crops. The actual evapotranspiration (ET) was estimated using geeSEBAL based on the Surface Energy Balance Algorithm for Land (SEBAL) methodology, while for crop yield estimations Monteith’s Light Use Efficiency model (LUE) was employed. The results indicate that the WP in the LUB is below its optimum targets, revealing that there is a significant degree of work necessary to ameliorate the WP in the LUB. The WP varies between 0.49–0.55 (kg/m3) for irrigated wheat, 0.27–0.34 for rainfed wheat, 1.7–2.2 for apples, 1.2–1.7 for grapes, 5.5–6.2 for sugar beets, and 0.67–1.08 for alfalfa, which could be potentially increased up to 80%, 150%, 76%, 83%, 55%, and 48%, respectively. The spatial variation of the WP and crop yield makes it feasible to detect the areas with the best and poorest on-farm practices, thereby facilitating the better targeting of resources to bridge the WP gap through water management practices. This study provides important insights into the status and potential of WP with possible worldwide applications at both farm and government levels for policymakers, practitioners, and growers to adopt effective policy guidelines and improve on-farm practices
UNDERSTANDING HIGH-L STATES OF : EXPERIMENT AND THE POLARIZATION
No full text Supported by NSF under Grant PHY-87-09707 W. G. Sturrus, E. A. Hessels, P. W. Arcuni, and S. R. Lundeen, Phys. Rev. A 38, 135 (1988) W. G. Sturrus, E. A. Hessels, P. W. Arcuni, and S. R. Lundeen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 2320 (1988)Author Institution: Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Notre Dame NotreThe high-L, non-penetrating, Rydberg states of can be understood with a physical picture which would be quite inappropriate for low-L states. The structure of high-L states is dominated by long-range, rather than short range, interactions, with inter-series mixing playing only a minor role. These physical ideas are incorporated into the ``polarization model'' which gives a rather successful a-priori theoretical description of such states.1 The most precise experimental studies of high-L structure have been obtained using fast beam microwave/optical methods.2 In separate experiments, both the (0,1)10L states with , and the (0,1) nL states with and have been studied with precision of . The most recent experimental results obtained with these techniques will be reviewed and compared with the predictions of the polarization model
Accounting for seasonal land use dynamics to improve estimation of agricultural irrigation water withdrawals
No full textThe assessment of water withdrawals for irrigation is essential for managing water resources in cultivated tropical catchments. These water withdrawals vary seasonally, driven by wet and dry seasons. A land use map is one of the required inputs of hydrological models used to estimate water withdrawals in a catchment. However, land use maps provide typically static information and do not represent the hydrological seasons and related cropping seasons and practices throughout the year. Therefore, this study assesses the value of seasonal land use maps in the quantification of water withdrawals for a tropical cultivated catchment. We developed land use maps for the main seasons (long rains, dry, and short rains) for the semi-arid Kikuletwa catchment, Tanzania. Three Landsat 8 images from 2016 were used to develop seasonal land use land cover (LULC) maps: March (long rains), August (dry season), and October (short rains). Quantitative and qualitative observation data on cropping systems (reference points and questionnaires/surveys) were collected and used for the supervised classification algorithm. Land use classifications were done using 20 land use and land cover classes for the wet season image and 19 classes for the dry and short rain season images. Water withdrawals for irrigated agriculture were calculated using (1) the static land use map or (2) the three seasonal land use maps. Clear differences in land use can be seen between the dry and the other seasons and between rain-fed and irrigated areas. A difference in water withdrawals was observed when seasonal and static land use maps were used. The highest differences were obtained for irrigated mixed crops, with an estimation of 572 million m3/year when seasonal dynamic maps were used and only 90 million m3/year when a static map was used. This study concludes that detailed seasonal land use maps are essential for quantifying annual irrigation water use of catchment areas with distinct dry and wet seasonal dynamics.Water Resource
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