Search results for "Water Resources"
showing 10 items of 152 documents
EAGLE 2006 – multi-purpose, multi-angle and multi-sensor in-situ, airborne and space borne campaigns over grassland and forest
2009
Abstract. EAGLE2006 – an intensive field campaign for the advances in land surface hydrometeorological processes – was carried out in the Netherlands from 8 to 18 June 2006, involving 16 institutions with in total 67 people from 16 different countries. In addition to the acquisition of multi-angle and multi-sensor satellite data, several airborne instruments – an optical imaging sensor, an imaging microwave radiometer, and a flux airplane – were deployed and extensive ground measurements were conducted over one grassland site at Cabauw and two forest sites at Loobos and Speulderbos in the central part of the Netherlands. The generated data set is both unique and urgently needed for the deve…
A European Multi Lake Survey dataset of environmental variables, phytoplankton pigments and cyanotoxins
2018
Under ongoing climate change and increasing anthropogenic activity, which continuously challenge ecosystem resilience, an in-depth understanding of ecological processes is urgently needed. Lakes, as providers of numerous ecosystem services, face multiple stressors that threaten their functioning. Harmful cyanobacterial blooms are a persistent problem resulting from nutrient pollution and climate-change induced stressors, like poor transparency, increased water temperature and enhanced stratification. Consistency in data collection and analysis methods is necessary to achieve fully comparable datasets and for statistical validity, avoiding issues linked to disparate data sources. The Europea…
Evaluation of the Water Scarcity Energy Cost for Users
2013
Abstract: In systems experiencing water scarcity and consequent intermittent supply, users often adopt private tanks that collect water during service periods and supply users when the service is not available. The tank may be fed by gravity or by private pumping stations depending on the network pressure level. Once water resources are collected, the tank can supply users by gravity if it is located on the rooftop or by additional pumping if underground. Private tanks thus increase the energy cost of the water supply service for users by introducing several small pumping structures inside the network. The present paper aims to evaluate this users’ energy cost for different private tank con…
Economic feasibility study for wastewater treatment: a cost-benefit analysis.
2010
Water resource management should be made from a multidisciplinary perspective. In this sense, economic research into the design and implementation of policies for the efficient management of water resources has been emphasized by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is one of the more widely accepted economic instruments since it is a rational and systematic decision-making support tool. Moreover, the wastewater treatment process has significant associated environmental benefits. However, these benefits are often left uncalculated because they have no market value. In this paper, using the concept of shadow price, a quantification of the environmental be…
Life Cycle Costing: a tool to manage the urban water cycle
2013
The Water Framework Directive puts much emphasis on the role of economics for improving the management of water resources. In the context of the urban water cycle, previous studies have proven that Life Cycle Costing (LCC) is a useful methodology for assessing the costs of the whole cycle. However, there are many elements and factors that can influence the results of the LCC assessment and therefore affect the decision making process. The main aim of this study is to identify the main difficulties for carrying out LCC studies in the urban water cycle and to propose some solutions to overcome them. Hence, the conclusions obtained from the assessment of several case studies will be more robus…
Exploring the Potential and the Boundaries of the Rolling Horizon Technique for the Management of Reservoir Systems with over-Year Behaviour
2016
The paper presents a set of experiments on the Rolling Horizon Technique (RHT), applied to the management of a multi-reservoir, multipurpose water resources system with over-year behaviour. In the RHT, decisions on releases from reservoirs are taken for a number of time steps ahead (the Forecasting Horizon – FH) through an optimization model, based on the present water availability in reservoirs and on some forecasts of future inflows over the FH. Only the decision concerning the first time step (the current month) is then implemented, as new information on reservoir levels and forecasts becomes available so that the process can start again with updated information. The paper investigates h…
Technical efficiency and cost analysis in wastewater treatment processes: A DEA approach
2009
In light of the growing importance of water reuse as an alternative source of water resources in many regional areas, the objective of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants as a basic requisite to improve the potential of the water reuse. The analytical benchmarking methodology Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to calculate efficiency measurements. An efficiency index is obtained for each plant by means of mathematical programming techniques, aiming to minimise the inputs used in the water treatment process. This indicator is used as a reference to analyse plants' activity through a series of variables including the size of the plant or its cost struct…
Estimating the environmental and resource costs of leakage in water distribution systems: A shadow price approach.
2016
Water scarcity is one of the main problems faced by many regions in the XXIst century. In this context, the need to reduce leakages from water distribution systems has gained almost universal acceptance. The concept of sustainable economic level of leakage (SELL) has been proposed to internalize the environmental and resource costs within economic level of leakage calculations. However, because these costs are not set by the market, they have not often been calculated. In this paper, the directional-distance function was used to estimate the shadow price of leakages as a proxy of their environmental and resource costs. This is a pioneering approach to the economic valuation of leakage exter…
Groundwater sustainability: Developing a non-cooperative optimal management scenario in shared groundwater resources under water bankruptcy condition…
2021
Abstract Groundwater level drawdown changes the hydrological cycle and poses challenges such as land subsidence and reduction of the groundwater quality. In this study, a new approach using a simulation-optimization framework was developed for shared groundwater management under water bankruptcy conditions (where water demand is greater than the allowable discharge capacity of water resources). The novelty of this study lies in using bankruptcy rules and a game model to manage a bankrupted shared groundwater resource considering aquifer sustainability. Accordingly, groundwater flow in the aquifer was numerically simulated by a finite-differences model (MODFLOW). Then, the repeated performan…
Subsecond pore‐scale displacement processes and relaxation dynamics in multiphase flow
2014
With recent advances at X‐ray microcomputed tomography (μCT) synchrotron beam lines, it is now possible to study pore‐scale flow in porous rock under dynamic flow conditions. The collection of four‐dimensional data allows for the direct 3‐D visualization of fluid‐fluid displacement in porous rock as a function of time. However, even state‐of‐the‐art fast‐μCT scans require between one and a few seconds to complete and the much faster fluid movement occurring during that time interval is manifested as imaging artifacts in the reconstructed 3‐D volume. We present an approach to analyze the 2‐D radiograph data collected during fast‐μCT to study the pore‐scale displacement dynamics on the time s…