Browsing by Author "Fontane, Darrell G., advisor"
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Item Open Access Characterizing hydroclimatic variability in tributaries of the Upper Colorado River Basin - WY 1911-2001(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2009) Matter, Margaret A., author; Garcia, Luis A., advisor; Fontane, Darrell G., advisorMountain snowpack is the main source of water in the semi-arid Colorado River Basin (CRB), and while the demands for water are increasing, competing and often conflicting, the supply is limited and has become increasingly variable over the 20th Century. Greater variability is believed to contribute to lower accuracy in water supply forecasts, plus greater variability violates the assumption of stationarity, a fundamental assumption of many methods used by water resources engineers in planning, design and management. Thus, it is essential to understand the underpinnings of hydroclimatic variability in order to effectively meet future water supply challenges. A new methodology was applied to characterize time series of temperature, precipitation, and streamflow (i.e., historic and reconstructed undepleted flows) according to the three climate regimes that occurred in CRB during the 20th Century. Results for two tributaries in the Upper CRB show that hydroclimatic variability is more deterministic than previously thought because it entails complementary temperature and precipitation patterns associated with wetter or drier conditions on climate regime and annual scales. Complementary temperature (T) and precipitation (P) patterns characterize climate regime type (e.g., cool/wet and warm/dry), and temperatures increase or decrease and precipitation changes magnitude and timing according to the type of climate regime Accompanying each climate regime type, are complementary T and P patterns on annual scales that are associated with upcoming precipitation and annual basin yield. Annual complementary T and P patterns: (a) establish by fall; (b) are detectable as early as September; (c) persist to early spring; (d) are related to the relative magnitude of upcoming precipitation and annual basin yield; (e) are unique to climate regime type; and (f) are specific to each river basin. Thus, while most of the water supply in the Upper CRB originates from winter snowpack, statistically significant indictors of relative magnitude of upcoming precipitation and snowmelt runoff are evident in the fall, well before appreciable snow accumulation. Since natural and anthropogenic external forcings, including solar variability, anthropogenic climate change, and modifications to land use, land cover and water use, influence the climate modes that shape climate regimes, the external forcings also influence the complementary temperature and precipitation patterns accompanying each climate regime. Consequently, although complementary temperature and precipitation patterns are similar for climate regimes of the same type (e.g., cool/wet climate regimes), they also differ and the differences may be associated with anticipated or observed effects of external forcings. In summary, this research shows that hydroclimatic variability during the 20th Century is more deterministic than previously thought, and includes: (a) a series of alternating patterns in temperature and precipitation corresponding with changes in climate regimes; and (b) effects of anthropogenic external forcings on the complementary temperature and precipitation patterns accompanying the climate regimes. Results of this research suggest alternative strategies to incorporate into existing water supply forecasting methods to improve forecast accuracy and increase lead time up to six months, from April 1 to October 1 of the previous year. Based on the relationships revealed by this research, the physical mechanisms behind the relationships may be determined and used to improve models for water supply forecasting and water management; develop long-range forecasts; and downscale climate models. In addition, the research results may also be used: (a) to improve application of or develop alternatives to engineering and hydrologic methods based on the assumption of stationarity; (b) in developing science-based adaptive management strategies for natural and cultural resource managers; and (c) in developing restoration, conservation and management plants for fish, wildlife, forest, and other natural resources.Item Open Access Conjunctive management methodology considering stream-aquifer systems and reservoir operations(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2007) Cha, Kee-Uk, author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisorThe purpose of this research was to develop a methodology to determine whether conjunctive surface water and groundwater management integrated with reservoir operation could significantly reduce deficits in a river basin with a relatively limited alluvial aquifer. The Geum River basin is one of major river basins in South Korea. The upper region of the Geum River basin is typical of many river basins in Korea where the shape of river basin is narrow with small alluvial aquifer depths from 10m to 20m and where most of the groundwater pumped comes quickly from the steamflow. The basin has two surface reservoirs, Daecheong and Yongdam. The most recent reservoir, Yongdam, provides water to a trans-basin diversion, and therefore reduces the water resources available in the Geum River basin. After the completion of Yongdam reservoir, the reduced water supply in the Geum basin resulted in increasing conflicts between downstream water needs and required instream flows, particularly during the low flow season.Item Open Access General framework for a water quality knowledge and information network(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Dalcanale, Fernanda, author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisor; Grigg, Neil S., committee member; Vlachos, Evan, committee member; Ferreira do Amaral Porto, Monica, committee memberThe increasing pressure on water resources worldwide, due to growing demand, scarcity, and pollution, are leading to a shift from top-down models of management to interdisciplinary approaches and participatory processes, highlighting the need for collaborative work. As a result, the evolution in regulations and management practices and the forging of new partnerships are creating the need for unprecedented amounts of data and knowledge exchange, adding to the complexity of managing information on water resources. Regarding water quality management in particular, the interdependency with the land and the environment and the uncertainty around sources of contamination and chemical interactions can add to the problem. Furthermore, information and knowledge are produced by many different water quality management entities, and efficient means to communicate them are an important part of the process. Technology has provided some excellent tools for sharing information in all branches of science, including water resources. The latest developments go beyond static formats, allowing for the creation of online communities that can provide the necessary tools for information and knowledge exchange. In this project, a search for the available technology for collaboration, methods of community filtering, and community-based review was performed and the possible implementation of these tools to create a general framework for a collaborative “Water Quality Knowledge and Information Network” was evaluated. The main goals of the network are to advance water quality education and knowledge; encourage distribution and access to data; provide networking opportunities; allow public perceptions and concerns to be collected; promote exchange of ideas; and, give general, open, and free access to information. A reference implementation was made available online and received positive feedback from the community, which also suggested some possible improvements.Item Open Access Methodologies for transforming data to information and advancing the understanding of water resources systems towards integrated water resources management(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Oikonomou, Panagiotis D., author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisor; Waskom, Reagan M., advisor; Grigg, Neil S., committee member; Karavitis, Christos A., committee member; Anderson, Charles W., committee memberThe majority of river basins in the world, have undergone a great deal of transformations in terms of infrastructure and water management practices in order to meet increasing water needs due to population growth and socio-economic development. Surface water and groundwater systems are interwoven with environmental and socio-economic ones. The systems' dynamic nature, their complex interlinkages and interdependencies are inducing challenges for integrated water resources management. Informed decision-making process in water resources is deriving from a systematic analysis of the available data with the utilization of tools and models, by examining viable alternatives and their associated tradeoffs under the prism of a set of prudent priorities and expert knowledge. In an era of increasing volume and variety of data about natural and anthropogenic systems, opportunities arise for further enhancing data integration in problem-solving approaches and thus support decision-making for water resources planning and management. Although there is a plethora of variables monitored in various spatial and temporal scales, particularly in the United States, in real life, for water resources applications there are rarely, if ever, perfect data. Developing more systematic procedures to integrate the available data and harness their full potential of generating information, will improve the understanding of water resources systems and assist at the same time integrated water resources management efforts. The overarching objective of this study is to develop tools and approaches to overcome data obstacles in water resources management. This required the development of methodologies that utilize a wide range of water and environmental datasets in order to transform them into reliable and valuable information, which would address unanswered questions about water systems and water management practices, contributing to implementable efforts of integrated water resources management. More specifically, the objectives of this research are targeted in three complementary topics: drought, water demand, and groundwater supply. In this regard, their unified thread is the common quest for integrated river basin management (IRBM) under changing water resources conditions. All proposed methodologies have a common area of application namely the South Platte basin, located within Colorado. The area is characterized by limited water resources with frequent drought intervals. A system's vulnerability to drought due to the different manifestations of the phenomenon (meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, socio-economic and ecological) and the plethora of factors affecting it (precipitation patterns, the supply and demand trends, the socioeconomic background etc.) necessitates an integrated approach for delineating its magnitude and spatiotemporal extent and impacts. Thus, the first objective was to develop an implementable drought management policy tool based on the standardized drought vulnerability index framework and expanding it in order to capture more of drought's multifaceted effects. This study illustrated the advantages of a more transparent data rigorous methodology, which minimizes the need for qualitative information replacing it with a more quantitative one. It is believed that such approach may convey drought information to decision makers in a holistic manner and at the same time avoid the existing practices of broken linkages and fragmentation of reported drought impacts. Secondly, a multi-scale (well, HUC-12, and county level) comparative analysis framework was developed to identify the characteristics of the emergent water demand for unconventional oil and gas development. This effort revealed the importance of local conditions in well development patterns that influence water demand, the magnitude of water consumption in local scales in comparison to other water uses, the strategies of handling flowback water, and the need for additional data, and improved data collection methods for a detailed water life-cycle analysis including the associated tradeoffs. Finally, a novel, easy to implement, and computationally low cost methodology was developed for filling gaps in groundwater level time series. The proposed framework consists of four main components, namely: groundwater level time series; data (groundwater level, recharge and pumping) from a regional physically-based groundwater flow model; autoregressive integrated moving average with external inputs modeling; and the Ensemble Smoother (ES) technique. The methodology's efficacy to predict accurately groundwater levels was tested by conducting three numerical experiments at eighteen alluvial wells. The results suggest that the framework could serve as a valuable tool in gaining further insight of alluvium aquifer dynamics by filling missing groundwater level data in an intermittent or continuous (with relative short span) fashion. Overall, it is believed that this research has important implications in water resources decision making by developing implementable frameworks which advance further the understanding of water systems and may aid in integrated river basin management efforts.Item Open Access Methodology for evaluating flood damage reduction alternatives using a GIS-based MCDA interactive model(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2008) Lim, Kwang-Suop, author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisor; Grigg, Neil S., advisorFloodplain management involves the use of spatial physical information and information on decision makers' preferences. Both of these sources of information can have various degrees of imprecision. This research proposed a combined geographic information system (GIS) with Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). The use of GIS can give technical specialists and ultimately decision makers the possibility to find more spatially distributed information. These can be used to augment, an MCDA approach, which is an efficient tool for considering multiple-criteria in deciding on the best alternatives in a synthesized and integrated manner. The outcome of a floodplain management study is typically a recommendation for a single alternative flood management strategy. If this is developed by simply averaging over the entire floodplain, information is lost about the impact of the various alternatives on specific points in the floodplain. The ability to view this spatially distributed information could provide decision makers with a better understanding of the impacts of selected a specific alternative. Finally, a "cost of uniformity" metric is proposed that allows the decision makers to better determine the impact of selecting a single alternative for the floodplain by considering the spatially diverse information developed in the MCDA. The target region for a demonstration application of the methodology was the Suyoung River Basin in Korea. The 1991 Gladys flood event and five different return periods were used as a case study to demonstrate the proposed methodology of evaluation of various flood damage reduction alternatives. Through a case study, the characteristics of four different MCDA methods and the impact of inserting additional criteria into the MCDA are examined and compared. Based upon the comparison between the methods, it has been illustrated that the Improved Spatial Fuzzy Weighted Average Method using an S-shaped Membership Function applied to adjusted digital elevation maps provides enhanced information for evaluating flood damage reduction alternatives.Item Open Access Modeling the impact of climate change on water resources case study: Arkansas River Basin in Colorado(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Nasr Azadani, Fariborz, author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisor; Grigg, Neil S., committee member; Fitzhorn, Patrick A., committee memberThere is mounting evidence that amount of carbon dioxide is being increased which can lead to changing the global climate drastically during this century. Climate change can have important effect on the water resources and water demand like urban and agriculture uses. The effects of climate change have been explored in the Arkansas River Basin in Colorado which is one of the major rivers in Colorado that provides water for 650,000 people a year and irrigates around 280,600 acres of agriculture areas. The aim of this research is to project precipitation and temperature in smaller temporal and spatial scale by MAGICC/SCENGEN tool and model the impact of climate change on the water resources by water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) software to provide results for the water managers and policy makers. Two climate scenarios (A2 and B2) and a 550 ppm policy were used to project future temperature and precipitation in the Arkansas River Basin for the period of 2013 to 2040. Based on the results from the two climate scenarios, a warmer and drier climate is anticipated for the region. Three adaptation scenarios (new irrigation technology scenario, new irrigation technology along with crop change scenario, and new irrigation technology along with reducing crop area scenario) were analyzed to consider their effects to mitigate the negative impact of climate change in the Arkansas River Basin. The results of the simulation of these scenarios showed that all three have a relatively short term impact. This indicates that globe warming is a potentially very serious problem for water management in the Arkansas River Basin.Item Open Access Multicriteria decision support system to delineate water resources planning and management regions(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Coelho Maran, Ana Carolina, author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisor; Braga, Benedito P. F., committee member; Vlachos, Evan C., committee member; Labadie, John W., committee member; Mumme, Stephen P., committee memberThe lack of uniform and integrated water resources regions that support sustainable water management within river basins is a critical issue. Overlapping and redundant efforts in planning and management result from conflicting water resources regions, which hamper Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). In addition, the process of delineating these regions has often been executed without sufficient scientific support or a commonly agreed upon approach, usually resulting from political and historical circumstances. In spite of this, it is possible to improve the results by using knowledge gained from prior experiences, employing modern techniques, improving decision support systems (DSS), and also by taking into account multiple stakeholders’ interests. In order to harmonize multiple objectives, promote good governance practices and reflect the linkages between environmental, socioeconomic, political and historical aspects, it is imperative to define appropriate territorial limits for water resources planning and management regions. Given the presented problem, this study introduces an approach to support the process of delineating water resources regions based upon recognition of more comprehensive aspects and incorporation of these aspects into a DSS. A harmonized division of water resources regions, agreed upon between stakeholders, is the first step to promoting IWRM, furthering cross boundary cooperation and preventing conflicts. The proposed Water Resources Planning and Management Regions (WARPLAM) DSS is designed to be used by federal and state governments, international commissions and water councils. Although river basins are considered to be the most suitable boundaries to attain IWRM goals, the proposed DSS simulation model offers the option for decision makers to include socioeconomic, political and environmental aspects into the analysis. Its main goals are to promote a common approach relating to the reasoning used in this process and to reinforce the principles of IWRM. It is based upon the use of geographic information systems (GIS), knowledge-based systems (KBS) and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) combined with cluster analysis, dynamic programming (DP) and fuzzy analysis. WARPLAM DSS is also a flexible solution to support the delineation of regions in multiple levels of subsidiarity and to be adaptable to regional characteristics. The process of developing WARPLAM DSS can be summarized into the following three main phases: Phase 1) Evaluating the aspects related to the delineation of water resources planning and management regions through a comparative analysis in eleven different countries; Phase 2) Building the DSS through the definition of a suitable approach utilizing the aspects identified in Phase 1; and Phase 3) Demonstrating the capability of WARPLAM DSS through a case study in Brazil. The results of the study illustrate the potential for exploring different options for defining water resources regions depending upon the water resources management objectives and priorities. It is demonstrated that additional aspects, beyond solely river basin limits are being adopted in several countries. In addition, the results show that WARPLAM DSS provides a multifaceted and comprehensive solution to the complex issue of delineating water resources regions. The proposed DSS can also support multiple interests and multiple users; capacity building and access to knowledge from prior experiences; human judgment, intuition, experience and preferences; and flexibility. The building and operating of the DSS into an integrated system between ArcGIS and Excel is an adequate solution to address the user-end focus. Moreover, the combination of GIS with Cluster Analysis and DP in an adequate approach to address the presented needs. Finally, it is expected that WARPLAM DSS will improve the chances of successful IWRM practices, help lessen the boundary effects and promote cross-boundary cooperation, as well as support future decision-making processes and facilitate multiple stakeholders’ involvement. Key Terms: water resources planning and management, institutional framework, IWRM, decision support systems, GIS, cluster analysis, dynamic programming.Item Open Access Stochastic analysis of the impacts of rainfall patterns on groundwater recharge(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2009) Bahrawi, Jarbou Abdullah, author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisor; Bau, Domenico, advisorPotential climate change can impact groundwater recharge. Climate chance scenarios were constructed taking into account uncertainty concerning stochastic generation patterns of precipitation and change in the recharge. Because groundwater is directly connected to near-surface hydrologic processes, it intricately connected to the overall hydrologic cycle and could be directly affected by climatic change. Changes in groundwater recharge are likely to result from changes in the annual and seasonal distribution of precipitation. The relationship between the stochastic precipitation that infiltrates and recharges groundwater is the subject of active studies. This is an unprecedented and important research area. The goal of the present research is to attempt to characterize impacts on groundwater recharge by developing potential precipitation patterns and simulating the groundwater recharge in a groundwater simulation model. The stochastic generation of a precipitation model is estimated by adopting two processes for the rainfall. One model is a first order Markov chain. The second model used an exponential distribution model that was fitted to the historical time series of the amount of rain for rainy days. Based on the US Global Change Research Program report's of general predictions for the climate in northeastern North America over the next 100 years, six scenarios for a synthetic time series of precipitation ware developed. Precipitation is assumed to increase or decrease, with an average change ranging between 5 and 45 percent with 10 percent increments. The generated synthetic time series of precipitation were used in the GSFLOW model. Characteristic statistics and the frequency analysis of the recharge scenarios were estimated. The investigation shows that for the different scenarios, the recharge can be affected and changed to a much greater degree than the percentage change in precipitation. For example a scenario of 25% increase in precipitation showed an increase in recharge of approximately 60% while a 25% decrease in precipitation showed a 70% decrease in recharge.Item Open Access Use of multi-objective particle swarm optimization in water resources management(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2007) Baltar, Alexandre Moreira, author; Fontane, Darrell G., advisorWater resources management presents a large variety of multi-objective problems that require powerful optimization tools to fully characterize the existing trade-offs. Different optimization methods, based on mathematical programming at first and on evolutionary algorithms (EA) more recently, have been applied with various degrees of success. This dissertation presents a multi-objective implementation of a relatively recent evolutionary technique called particle swarm optimization (PSO). The multi-objective PSO (MOPSO) algorithm was implemented as a generalized solver for Microsoft Excel®, and applied to a set of test functions commonly used in the EA literature and to selected water resources management problems, including a classic multi-purpose reservoir operation problem, a problem of selective withdrawal from thermally stratified reservoirs, and a reservoir operation problem using storage guide curves with fuzzy objectives.