Describes the state-of-the-art techniques and the application of omics tools in wastewater treatment reactors (WWTRs) Includes both the theoretical and practical knowledge on the fundamental roles of microorganisms in WWTRs Discusses environmental microbial community proteomics Covers relating function and community structure of complex microbial systems using neural networks Reviews the economics of wastewater treatment and the development of suitable alternatives in terms of performance and cost effectiveness

For the Nonengineering Professional Perfect for anyone without a background in science or engineering who wants to take a closer look at how water is processed and treated, Reverse Osmosis: A Guide for the Nonengineering Professional relates reverse osmosis in its most basic form and addresses growing concerns about the quality of tap water. What is reverse osmosis? Not to be confused with filtration-which involves straining or size exclusion-reverse osmosis involves a diffusive mechanism and separation process that is dependent on solute concentration, pressure, and the water flux rate. This book describes all of the basic processes involved in reverse osmosis operations. Presented in a conversational style-using jargon-free language-it discusses in detail the drinking water purification, wastewater reuse, desalination processes, and other freshwater applications used to ensure the safe consumption of water. The book also places special emphasis on pharmaceuticals and personal care product (PPCP) contaminants, which are not typically removed from wastewater by conventional treatment processes, however, they can be removed by processes using sophisticated membrane filtration. The author provides a basic understanding of membrane technology, and explains the membrane treatment process. He details how the processes fit together within a drinking water or wastewater treatment system and presents concepts that make up water and wastewater treatment processes as a whole. He also highlights advances in reverse osmosis technology and discusses relevant applications. Presents a comprehensive coverage of reverse osmosis Discusses fundamental processes and equipment used in reverse osmosis Provides technical terminology in simplified form Reverse Osmosis: A Guide for the Nonengineering Professional explains how reverse osmosis

The greatest challenge facing humanity today is the transition to a more sustainable energy infrastructure while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting this challenge will require a diversified array of solutions spanning across multiple industries. One of the solutions rising to the fore is the potential to rapidly build out carbon sequestration, which involves the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its storage in the subsurface. Integrated Aquifer Characterization and Modeling for Energy Sustainability: Key Lessons from the Petroleum Industry provides a comprehensive and practical technical guide into the potential that aquifers hold as sites for carbon and energy storage. Aquifers occupy a significant part of the Earth's available volume in the subsurface and thus hold immense potential as sites for carbon storage. Many aquifers have been studied extensively as part of oil and gas energy development projects and, as such, they represent an opportunity to sequester carbon within existing areas of infrastructure that have already been impacted by, and integrated into, an inherited energy framework. Moreover, future efforts to reconfigure the landscape of our national and global energy systems can extract valuable lessons from this existing trove of data and expertise. From a multidisciplinary perspective, this book provides a valuable and up-to-date overview of how we can draw on the wealth of existing technologies and data deployed by the petroleum industry in the transition to a more sustainable future. Integrated Aquifer Characterization and Modeling for Energy Sustainability will be of value to academic, professional and business audiences who wish to evaluate the potential underground storage of carbon and/or energy, and for policy makers in developing the right policy tools to further the goals of a sustainable energy transition.

This holistic book covers the richest area in North East India in terms of both explored and foreseen reserves of fossil fuels and other natural resources. Using a multidisciplinary approach, GIS, and geospatial data gathered from different case studies included, this book helps readers develop a thorough understanding of a highly dynamic big river, the Brahmaputra, and use it as a comprehensive resource for further understanding the science of rivers. It discusses the causal factors of decadal-scale fluvial dynamics, the nature of fluvial dynamics, lateral variability of the older flood plains and neotectonics in the shallow subsurface, and the overall trend of basin evolution at different depths.

This book focuses on River Basin Organizations as the key institutions for managing internationally shared water resources. This includes a comparative analysis of all River Basin Organizations worldwide and three in-depth case studies from three different continents. The detailed case studies are the Senegal (West Africa), Mekong (South-east Asia) and Danube (Europe) rivers. The book contributes to the academic debate on how shared natural and environmental resources can be managed in a sustainable way and which institutional and legal mechanisms actually matter for doing so. It adopts the neo-institutionalist approach, according to which international environmental institutions do make a difference. The analysis not only confirms this argument for the specific case of shared water resources, but also refines existing hypotheses on the influence of different independent variables, namely the nature of the collective action problem, the constellation of actors and the institutional design of an international environmental institution. The work also contributes to the policy debate on how to better govern internationally shared natural resources and the environment. It provides policy makers with advice on which exogenous conditions to be aware of when managing water resources they share with co-riparians and which institutional design features and governance mechanisms to set up in order to increase effectiveness in management.

This book addresses strategies for food security and sustainable agriculture in developing economies. The book focuses primarily on India, a fast developing economy, whose natural resource base comprising land and water supporting agricultural production is not only under enormous stress, but also complex and not amenable to a uniform strategy. It critically reviews issues which continue to dominate the debate on water management for agricultural and food production. The book examines the validity of the claim that large water resources projects cause serious social and environmental damages using global and national datasets. The authors examine claims that the future of Indian agriculture is in rain-fed farming supported by small water harvesting. They question whether water-abundant eastern India could become the granary of India, through a groundwater revolution with the right policy inputs. In the process, they look at the less researched aspect of the food security challenge, which is land scarcity in eastern India. The book analyzes the physical, economic and social impacts of large-scale adoption of micro irrigation systems, using a farming system approach for north Gujarat. Through an economic valuation of the multiple use benefits from tank systems in western Orissa, it shows how value of water from large public irrigation systems could be enhanced. The book also looks at the reasons for the limited success in bringing about the much needed institutional reforms in canal irrigation for securing higher productivity and equity using case studies of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Finally it addresses how other countries in the developing world, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa could learn from Indian experience.

The Abay / Upper Blue Nile basin contributes the largest share of discharge to the river Nile. However, the basin exhibits large spatio-temporal variability in rainfall and runoff. Moreover, human activities also impact hydrological processes through intensive agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation, which substantially affect the basin hydrology. Thus, understanding hydrological processes and hydro-climatic variables at various spatio-temporal scales is essential for sustainable management of water resources in the region. This research investigates the hydrology of the basin in depth using a range of methods at various spatio-temporal scales. The methods include long-term trend analysis of hydroclimatic variables, hydrologic responses analysis of land cover change, stable isotope techniques and process based rainfallrunoff modelling. A combination of field investigations with new measurements of precipitation, water levels and stable isotopes as well as existing hydro-climatic data offered gaining new insights about runoff generation processes in headwater catchments. The use of rainfall-runoff modelling in two meso-scale catchments of the Abay basin depict that a single model structure in a lumped way for the entire Abay basin cannot represent all the dominant hydrological processes. The results of the different approaches demonstrated the potential of the methods to better understand the basin hydrology in a data scarce region.

1. Uses advanced geospatial technology to study fragile Himalayan ecosystems and their sustainability. 2. Provides satellite data and spatio-temporal analyses to assess and monitor water resources in the Himalayas. 3. Focuses on land use/land cover changes (LULCC) a leading aspect of environmental changes caused by human-induced activities in rapidly developing areas. 4. Includes case studies from Indian Himalayan, Nepal, and Afghanistan regions. 5. Discusses urban sprawls and future projections of groundwater resources and air pollution in the region.

The field of ecohydraulics integrates hydrodynamic and eco-dynamic processes. While hydrodynamic processes are usually well described by partial differential equations (PDE's) based on physical conservation principles, ecosystem dynamics often involve specific interactions at the local scale. Because of this, Cellular Automata (CA) are a viable paradigm in ecosystem modelling. All cells in a CA system update their states synchronously at discrete steps according to simple local rules. The classical CA configuration consists of uniformly distributed cells on a structured grid. But in the field of hydrodynamics, the use of unstructured grids has become more and more popular due to its flexibility to handle arbitrary geometries. The main objective of this research is to identify whether the CA paradigm can be extended to unstructured grids. To that end the concept of Unstructured Cellular Automata (UCA) is developed and various UCA configurations are explored and their performance investigated. The influence of cell size was analyzed in analogy with the Finite Volume Method. A characteristic parameter -min distance of UCA- was put forward and tested by numerical experiments. Special attention was paid to exploring the analogies and differences between the discrete CA paradigm and discrete numerical approximations for solving PDE's. The practical applicability of UCA in ecohydraulics modelling is explored through a number of case studies and compared with field measurements.

Due to the complexity of hydrological systems a single model may be unable to capture the full range of a catchment response and accurately predict the streamflows. A solution could be the in use of several specialized models organized in the so-called committees. Refining the committee approach is one of the important topics of this study, and it is demonstrated that it allows for increased predictive capability of models. Another topic addressed is the prediction of hydrologic models' uncertainty. The traditionally used Monte Carlo method is based on the past data and cannot be directly used for estimation of model uncertainty for the future model runs during its operation. In this thesis the so-called MLUE (Machine Learning for Uncertainty Estimation) approach is further explored and extended; in it the machine learning techniques (e.g. neural networks) are used to encapsulate the results of Monte Carlo experiments in a predictive model that is able to estimate uncertainty for the future states of the modelled system. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that a committee of several predictive uncertainty models allows for an increase in prediction accuracy. Catchments in Nepal, UK and USA are used as case studies. In flood modelling hydrological models are typically used in combination with hydraulic models forming a cascade, often supported by geospatial processing. For uncertainty analysis of flood inundation modelling of the Nzoia catchment (Kenya) SWAT hydrological and SOBEK hydrodynamic models are integrated, and the parametric uncertainty of the hydrological model is allowed to propagate through the model cascade using Monte Carlo simulations, leading to the generation of the probabilistic flood maps. Due to the high computational complexity of these experiments, the high performance (cluster) computing framework is designed and used. This study refined a number of hydroinformatics techniques, thus enhancing uncertainty-based hydrological and integrated modelling.

This book presents recent lessons learned in the context of research and development for various dryland ecosystems, focusing on water resources management, land and vegetation cover degradation and remediation, and socioeconomic aspects, as well as integrated approaches to ensuring water and land security in view of the current and predicted climate change. As water and land are the essential bases of food production, the management of these natural resources is becoming a cornerstone for the development of dryland populations. The book gathers the peer-reviewed, revised versions of the most outstanding papers on these topics presented at the ILDAC2015 Conference in Djerba, Tunisia.

Population growth in the Blue Nile Basin has led to fast land-use changes from forest to agricultural land, which resulted in speeding up the soil erosion processes producing highly negative impacts on the local soil fertility and agricultural productivity. The eroded sediment is transported downstream by water and sinks in the lower basin where it significantly reduces reservoir storage and irrigation canals capacity. The only effective solution to mitigate the sedimentation problem is to limit the sediment inputs from upstream by locally implementing erosion control practices. However, given the vastness and remoteness of the involved areas, this first requires the knowledge of the most critical zones. The book identifies the sources of the sediment depositing in the Lower Blue Nile Basin and quantifies the amounts involved providing essential information for the planning and implementation of any interventions aiming at reducing soil erosion. The methods used consist of extensive field work covering most of the basin, watershed, hydrodynamic and morphodynamic modelling and, for the first time, the mineralogical analysis of the sediment at the sources and sinks. The method is successful in indentifying the areas providing most of the transported sediment, where it is recommended to start with erosion control practices.

This title, first published in 1987, provides an authoritative account of both the science and the politics of acid rain. Chris Park places the debates surrounding acid rain in context, and examines the full implications of scientific studies and the effects of acid rain on surface waters, soils and buildings. Evidence is drawn from around the world, including an examination of the damage in Scandinavia and Germany and the effects of acid rain in the U.K. and U.S.A. A comprehensive and relevant work, this is an important guide for students of geography, environment and sustainability and energy policy.

Climate change, rapid population growth and urbanization are causing water shortage and pollution, especially in arid and semi-arid regions of the world due to the growing demand in different sectors and disposal of inadequately treated wastewater to water bodies. To tackle these challenges, further treatment and reuse of wastewater effluent using soil aquifer treatment (SAT) is an attractive cost-effective and environmentally friendly option that is employed with no intensive use of electricity and chemicals.
This study highlights the prospects of using SAT for treatment and reuse of primary effluent (PE), especially in developing countries where wastewater is not treated to secondary and tertiary effluent levels due to lack of investment and operation costs to run sizable wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Coupled with experimental studies that show SAT efficiency to remove suspended solids, bulk organic matter, nutrients and pathogens indicators from PE, the thesis provides step-by-step tools that could be used for development of new SAT scheme. Furthermore, the study provides a water quality prediction model that estimates the potential contaminants removal which could be used to assess the need for reclaimed water post-treatment.
This thesis is envisaged to contribute to the current knowledge on the necessity of water reuse.

Mountains are water towers of our world, but their role in global water resources may be altered due to changing climate. This book provides an integrated assessment of the spatial and temporal variability of both recent and future climate change impacts in the Yellow River source region (YRSR) with specific focus on extremes. The book is structured across four different topics from detecting contemporary hydro-climatic changes, comparing three different statistical downscaling methods, assessing elevation dependency of expected changes in temperature, and projecting future climate-induced hydrologic changes in the YRSR. The detection of historical hydro-climatic changes in recent decades indicates that climate change may already be happening and may pose a serious threat to water availability in this region. However, an ensemble of climate change projections for the periods 2046-2065 and 2081-2100 based on two GCMs and three emission scenarios demonstrates that the future water availability of this region would increase due to climate change. This discrepancy suggests that contemporary hydro-climatic experience based on past records alone may not always provide a reliable guide to the future. This study makes an important contribution toward an improved understanding of climate change impacts in the YRSR. The knowledge generated has major implications for water resources management in the Yellow River and will be instructive for climate change impacts studies in other mountain areas.

Urban informal settlements or slums are growing rapidly in cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Most often, a sewer system is not present and the commonly-used low-cost onsite wastewater handling practices, typically pit latrines, are frequently unplanned, uncontrolled and inefficient. Consequently, most households dispose of their untreated or partially treated wastewater on-site, generating high loads of nutrients to groundwater and streams draining these areas. However, the fate of nutrients in urban slums is generally unknown. In excess, these nutrients can cause eutrophication in downstream water bodies. This book provides an understanding of the hydro-geochemical processes affecting the generation, fate and transport of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) in a typical urban slum area in Kampala, Uganda. The approach used combined experimental and modeling techniques, using a large set of hydrochemical and geochemical data collected from shallow groundwater, drainage channels and precipitation. The results show that both nitrogen-containing acid precipitation and domestic wastewater from slum areas are important sources of nutrients in urban slum catchments. For nutrients leaching to groundwater, pit latrines retained over 80% of the nutrient mass input while the underlying alluvial sandy aquifer was also an effective sink of nutrients where nitrogen was removed by denitrification and anaerobic oxidation and phosphorus by adsorption to calcite. In surface water, nutrient attenuation processes are limited. This study argues that groundwater may not be important as regards to eutrophication implying that management interventions in slum areas should primarily focus on nutrients released into drainage channels. This research is of broad interest as urbanization is an ongoing trend and many developing countries lack proper sanitation systems.

Field Practices for Wastewater Use in Agriculture discusses the growing importance of wastewater application in the field of agriculture. Addressing the tremendous need for the irrigation sector to reduce the demand for freshwater in agriculture, this volume looks at wastewater as a source for agricultural irrigation. The volume is divided into four sections: current and emerging issues in wastewater use in agriculture, wastewater management with biological systems, effective field practices for wastewater use, and case studies that provide information on scientific analytical studies on the environment under the influence of wastewater quality from different pollution sources. This book sheds light on the vast potential of wastewater use in agricultural irrigation while also considering safety of the agricultural products for human consumption. Much emphasis has also been given to technological aspects for the treatment of wastewater to protect our environment for better public health protection.

Despite the mechanisms of reservoir sedimentation being well known for a long time, sustainable and preventive measures are rarely taken into consideration in the design of new reservoirs. To avoid operational problems of powerhouses, sedimentation is often treated for existing reservoirs with measures which are efficient only for a limited time. The today's challenge of dam owners and engineers is to guarantee with adequate mitigation measures the future sustainable use of the vital reservoirs supplying water for drinking, food and energy production. Research and development is still urgently needed to identify efficient mitigation measures adapted to the main sedimentation processes involved in reservoirs. During the seventh International Conference on Fluvial Hydraulics "River Flow 2014" at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, scientists and professionals from all over the world addressed the challenge of reservoir sedimentation in a special session and exchanged their knowledge and experiences. Invited and selected contributions, which give an overview on the latest developments and research regarding reservoir sedimentation including case studies, are presented in this book, in the hope that they can contribute to better sustainable use of the vital reservoirs worldwide.

This study investigates the role of coagulation in enhancing hydraulic performance and permeate quality of UF membranes and provides insight into options for minimizing or ideally eliminating coagulation from UF pre-treatment to SWRO. Results show that coagulation improves UF hydraulic performance mainly by reducing non-backwashable fouling of the membranes. This can be achieved at very low coagulant dose ( 0.5 mg Fe/L) by coating the membranes with sub-micron particles.
Additionally, the work highlights the applicability of UF membranes with low molecular weight cut-off as the coagulant free future of SWRO pre-treatment. Major benefits in terms of reduced environmental impact is expected when applying membranes with low molecular weight cut-off, as the need for coagulation is eliminated while ensuring longevity of downstream SWRO membranes. In general terms, the research indicates that coagulant consumption can be significantly reduced in UF pre-treatment of SWRO by optimizing operational parameters and applying alternative solutions.

This book accounts for the previously inadequately explained transformation in the meaning of equity in sixteenth century England, a transformation which, intriguingly, first comes to light in literary texts rather than political or legal treatises. The book address the two principal literary works in which the transformation becomes apparent, Thomas More's Utopia and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and sketches the history of equity to its roots in the Greek concept of epieikeia, uncovering along the way both previously unexplained distinctions, and a long-obscured esoteric meaning. These rediscoveries, when brought to bear upon the Utopia and Faerie Queene, illuminate critical though relatively neglected textual passages that have long puzzled scholars.

Presenting the hydrological research carried out in the Migina catchment (260 km2), Southern Rwanda with the objective to explore the hydrological trends and climate linkages for catchments in Rwanda (26,338 km2), and to contribute to the understanding of dominant hydrological process interactions. Different Hydro-meteorological instrumentations have been installed for several months in the Migina catchment and measurements have been carried out. The trend analysis is based on Mann-Kendall (MK) test and Pettitt test on times series data varying from 30 to 56 years before 2000. The hydrometric data and modern tracer methods is used for hydrograph separation and show that subsurface runoff is dominating the total discharge even during rainy seasons at Cyihene-Kansi and Migina sub-catchments, respectively. Further, a semi-distributed conceptual hydrological model HEC-HMS is applied for assessing the spatio-temporal variation of water resources in the Migina catchment. The model results are compared with tracer based hydrograph separation results in terms of the runoff components. The model performed reasonably well in simulating the total flow volume, peak flow and timing as well as the portion of direct runoff and baseflow.

Geochemical reaction modeling plays an increasingly vital role in several areas of geoscience ranging from groundwater and surface water hydrology to environmental preservation and remediation to economic and petroleum geology. This book provides an up-to-date overview and a large number of fully worked examples of the use of numerical methods to model reaction processes in the Earth's crust and on its surface. Special attention is given to integrating surface complexation, kinetic rate laws, and isotope fractionation into quantitative process models. Earth science professionals and students in a variety of specialties will benefit from the wealth of information and practical advice this book has to offer.

This study assessed the downstream river system adaptation in response to upstream damming on the Ribb River, Ethiopia, to irrigate 15,000 ha. It combined primary and secondary data, and the application of remote sensing and mathematical modeling. The pre-dam morphodynamic trends of the Ribb River were analyzed for 59 years based on aerial photographs, satellite images, and newly collected field data. Three dam operation scenarios were developed to analyze the long-term hydro-morphological effects of the dam on the downstream river reaches. It also assessed the applicability of physics-based analytical equations (Equilibrium Theory) compared to a 1D numerical model (SOBEK-RE) to determine the least-morphologically impactful dam operation scenario on the river reaches downstream of the dam. Moreover, a HEC-RAS 2D hydrodynamic model was developed to assess the effect of the dam on the flooding extent of the Fogera Plain. This was used to study the potential implications of hydrological alteration on the ecology of the floodplain wetlands, as they are the habitats of important fish and bird species. The results contribute to knowledge on the hydro-morphological and environmental impacts of dams on downstream river systems. The developed methodologies and findings may be used to study future hydro-morphological and ecological changes that may arise due to other dam operations or climate change.

In general, groundwater is a preferred source of drinking water because of its convenient availability and its constant and good quality. However this source is vulnerable to contamination by several substances. Acceptable quality limits relative to micropollutant contents in drinking water are becoming increasingly lower and efficient elimination treatment processes are being implemented in order to meet these requirements. Metals contaminants at low concentration are difficult to remove from water. Chemical precipitation and other methods become inefficient when contaminants are present in trace concentrations and the process of adsorption is one of the few alternatives available for such situations. This book describes the adsorption method in the removal of selected heavy metals present as cations (Cd2+, Cu2+ and Pb2+) or oxyanions (Cr(VI) and As(V)) using iron oxide coated sand (IOCS) and granular ferric hydroxide (GFH). The effects of pH, natural organic matter (fulvic acid (FA)) and interfering ions (PO43-, Ca2+) on the adsorption efficiency were also assessed. The sorption reactions that take place at the surface of the adsorbent were also described through the surface complexation modelling for Cd2+, Cu2+ and Pb2+ adsorption. Batch adsorption tests and rapid small scale column tests (RSST) were used as laboratory methods.

The book provides an overview of climate change-sensitive water resources management with consideration of adaptation approaches, the assessment of climate change impacts, current contemporary management techniques, and ecological responses. Comprehensive assessments and studies from eight countries using innovative approaches that aid water management under evolving climates are documented. Topics ranging from hydrologic design to management and policy responses to climate change are discussed, which demonstrate updated theories that highlight methods, tools, and experiences on the topic of water resources under climate change. The generic approaches discussed, and their applications to different climate change-related problems, make this book appealing to a global readership. The practical and applied methodologies presented in the book and through insightful case studies discussed will provide readers worldwide with ready-to-use information to manage water resources sustainably under evolving climate. This book is ideally suited for water resource managers, scientists, professionals from water management agencies, graduate students, and national laboratory agencies responsible for water and environmental management.