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Books > Earth & environment > Earth sciences > The hydrosphere
This book describes concepts and tools needed for water resources management, including methods for modeling, simulation, optimization, big data analysis, data mining, remote sensing, geographical information system, game theory, conflict resolution, System dynamics, agent-based models, multiobjective, multicriteria, and multiattribute decision making and risk and uncertainty analysis, for better and sustainable management of water resources and consumption, thus mitigating the present and future global water shortage crisis. It presents the applications of these tools through case studies which demonstrate its benefits of proper management of water resources systems. This book acts as a reference for students, professors, industrial practitioners, and stakeholders in the field of water resources and hydrology.
This book analyses and quantifies how and where energy and water are consumed by the ceramic sanitary-ware industry and provides solutions as to how to reduce this. The whole production process is mapped, including modelling methods. The book begins by providing an introduction to ceramic sanitary-ware production and types of factories casting technology. It then moves on to discuss the process and energy modelling for the production line, analysis of energy and water consumptions and proposals for improvements. The last chapter presents the practical implementation of the selected modelling configuration. This book is of particular interest to water and energy management professionals within the ceramic industry, but the methods are of interest to those in other production industries as well.
Coastal Flood Risk Reduction: The Netherlands and the U.S. Upper Texas Coast represents the culmination of a 5-year international research and education partnership funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and more than 10 years of collaboration between Dutch and U.S. flood experts on the basic issue of how to protect society from growing flood risks. Multiple case studies integrating the fields of engineering, hydrology, landscape architecture, economics, and planning address the underlying characteristics of physical flood risks and their prediction; human communities and the associated built environment; physical, social, and built-environment variables; and mitigation techniques. In recognition of the lack of systematic research and the growing societal need to better understand flood impacts, this edited book provides an in-depth, comparative evaluation of flood problems and solutions in two key places: the Netherlands and the U.S. Upper Texas Coast. Both regions are extremely flood-prone and have experienced continual adverse impacts throughout their histories. For researchers in flood management, geographers, hydrologists, environmental studies, and social science as well as policymakers and decision-makers in flood management authorities and related industries, this book provides an essential resource.
R and Python for Oceanographers: A Practical Guide with Applications describes the uses of scientific Python packages and R in oceanographic data analysis, including both script codes and graphic outputs. Each chapter begins with theoretical background that is followed by step-by-step examples of software applications, including scripts, graphics, tables and practical exercises for better understanding of the subject. Examples include frequently used data analysis approaches in physical and chemical oceanography, but also contain topics on data import/export and GIS mapping. The examples seen in book provide uses of the latest versions of Python and R libraries.
The small water bodies such as headwater streams, springs, ditches, small lakes, and ponds are critical to maintaining freshwater biodiversity. This is especially true for Dinaric karst, where they are often the only water bodies present. However, despite their importance, they remain widely overlooked and excluded from government policies like the EU Water Framework Directive. This book includes information on different aspects of these essential but still neglected habitats. This book intends to be of interest to a wide range of audiences, from researchers and conservationists to the public and decision-makers.
This research monograph deals with the study of wave phenomena caused by winds in the world's oceans. Particular attention is paid to modern developments that take into account the propagation of ocean waves at global distances and their interaction with the sea bottom, ocean currents and the ice cover. With this book the author provides the first methodical presentation of the generation, evolution and propagation of wind-induced ocean waves.
This book presents state-of-the-art knowledge concerning water quality in Poland. It offers a wide variety of cases and issues on water resource quality management. The book also presents different methods and strategies to effectively use the most advanced water resource quality problems such as water pollution, whether physical, chemical, or biological, of surface water resources and groundwater resources. The authors pay exceptional attention to water quality monitoring in agricultural, urban catchments, and water reservoirs. More light into the water quality is required to assess water's physicochemical status accurately and plan suitable protection actions against recognized threats. This book addresses the needs of professional engineers, researchers, policy planners, decision-makers, stakeholders, and anyone looking to learn more about the quality situation of water resources in Poland and other similar countries and regions.
This book provides essential information and recent findings on hydro-environmental issues in the Lower Danube River, particularly its hydrological and hydromorphological processes; physico-chemical features; climate and water-related hazards; and not only the biodiversity and quality but also the sustainable management and governance of its hydro-environment. Accordingly, it presents a broad range of scientific information on the lower sector of the second-longest river in Europe, which holds major economic importance and has been severely impacted by human pressures, especially since the second part of the last century. The engineering works (e.g. dams, reservoirs, levees, channelization, etc.) on the Danube and its tributaries, despite their benefits to society, have altered its flow and significantly reduced its sediment load, with consequences for hydromorphological processes and aquatic ecosystems. These ecosystems have also been affected by pollution from various sources. To promote sustainable management of the Danube River and its watershed, several strategies and measures have been developed by a number of institutions, from the European level to the national and regional levels (commissions, national authorities, non-governmental organizations, etc.). Compared to the upper and middle sectors of the Danube, the lower sector has received less attention in the international scientific literature in terms of hydro-environmental issues. The book fills this gap and provides current and original insights and findings from recent studies conducted by scientists from three countries drained by the Lower Danube River and its tributaries: Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. This unique book will be of great scientific interest to professional engineers, policy planners and policymakers in the three countries mentioned above, helping them to implement their own sustainable development plans. It also offers a valuable resource for graduate students, researchers and stakeholders.
This journal-like book series includes edited volumes to rapidly report and spread the latest technological results, new scientific discovery and valuable applied researches in the fields concerning offshore robotics as well as promote international academic exchange. We aim to make it one of the premier comprehensive academic publications of world offshore vehicle and robotics community. The audience of the series will include the scholars, researchers, engineers and students who are interested in fields of autonomous marine vehicles and robotics, including autonomous surface vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles, remote operation vehicles, marine bionics, marine vehicle modeling, guidance, navigation, control and cooperation and so on.
Data assimilation aims at determining as accurately as possible the state of a dynamical system by combining heterogeneous sources of information in an optimal way. Generally speaking, the mathematical methods of data assimilation describe algorithms for forming optimal combinations of observations of a system, a numerical model that describes its evolution, and appropriate prior information. Data assimilation has a long history of application to high-dimensional geophysical systems dating back to the 1960s, with application to the estimation of initial conditions for weather forecasts. It has become a major component of numerical forecasting systems in geophysics, and an intensive field of research, with numerous additional applications in oceanography, atmospheric chemistry, and extensions to other geophysical sciences. The physical complexity and the high dimensionality of geophysical systems have led the community of geophysics to make significant contributions to the fundamental theory of data assimilation. This book gathers notes from lectures and seminars given by internationally recognized scientists during a three-week school held in the Les Houches School of physics in 2012, on theoretical and applied data assimilation. It is composed of (i) a series of main lectures, presenting the fundamentals of the most commonly used methods, and the information theory background required to understand and evaluate the role of observations; (ii) a series of specialized lectures, addressing various aspects of data assimilation in detail, from the most recent developments of the theory to the specificities of various thematic applications.
This book presents the phylogeny, taxonomy and biogeography of freshwater red algae. Its content is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides a brief history of freshwater red algal research, habits and collecting methods, general biogeographic trends and an overview of the taxonomic/phylogenetic placement of freshwater taxa. The other four chapters are taxonomic treatments of non-marine red algae based on taxonomic levels, i.e. classes within the phylum Rhodophyta, orders within each class, families within each order, and genera within each family. Descriptions, phylogenetic data (including numerous trees), geographic range (maps for most species) and dichotomous keys for identification are presented. Comprehensive data are provided for more than 220 species.
Ecosystem-Based Adaptation: Approaches to Sustainable Management of Aquatic Resources presents a close examination of the role of ecosystem-based adaptation in managing river basins, aquifers, flood plains and their vegetation to provide water storage and flood regulation. Furthermore, the book explores improved ecosystem-based services for managing floods, conservation of water and its resources (including watersheds), avoiding water scarcity, and ensuring long-term water security planning, all in the context of sustainable development goals. This book will help scientists pave the way for easy implementation of sustainable development goals, ensuring a secure and sustainable future.
This book provides information on the causes, consequences, and possible solutions to modern environmental problems associated with ocean pollution with a particular focus on the Back Sea. The oceans are a vast but fragile complex. In recent decades, it has become especially manifest when ocean pollution has reached an unparalleled situation. Meanwhile, not only the well-being of ecosystems depends on the state of ocean waters, but human civilization largely depends on the oceans as a consequence of environmental dependence. This book examines the consequences of pollutants such as oil and hydrocarbon products (including plastics and microplastics), water acidification, sewage, wastewaters discharge into the ocean, thermal pollution, nuclear pollution, and biological pollution. Beyond the types of pollutants and their consequences, this book outlines the state of the art of the legal situation internationally regarding ocean pollution. The authors also show the current pollution of the inland seas, taking as an example of the Black Sea (anthropogenic and natural sources of pollution, its shelf, and shallow waters as well as international legislation). A part of the book analyzes the main types of environmental monitoring of the oceans and their role in solving ocean pollution problems with a particular interest in the Black Sea. The book is of interest to specialists in ocean pollution, ecologists, oceanologists, students, and graduate students studying oceanography, marine ecology, current methods of environmental monitoring, and legal problems related to the oceans and seas pollution, as well as to anyone interested in modern problems of the oceans.
The book provides insights into the particular nature of water-related challenges in metropolitan regions of the Global South and the "scalar mismatches" that prevent their sustainable and inclusive development. It argues for the adoption of a metropolitan water governance approach to assess these challenges, including the drivers and institutions that shape these, and the policy instruments at river basin and urban scales that aim to address these. The cases of Mexico City and Sao Paulo, as two mega-cities with a wide ranging of water-related challenges, present lessons to other fast growing urban agglomerations on the variety of possible responses as well as obstacles to their effectiveness that receive little attention.
This book, as a part of a series of CERES publications, provides a multi-regional and cross-sectoral analysis of food and water security, especially in the era of climate risks, biodiversity loss, pressure on scarce resources, especially land and water, increasing global population, and changing dietary preferences. It includes both conceptual research and empirically-based studies, which provides context-specific analyses and recommendations based on a variety of case studies from Africa, Middle East, and Asia regarding the fostering of long-term resilience of food and water security. The core approach of the volume consists of: assessing the structural drivers affecting the vulnerability of food and water security, under the persistence of current trends; identifying the best solutions and practices to enhance the climate resilience for food and water security; and fostering climate adaptation and biodiversity protection for food and water security.
Hurricanes are nature's most destructive agents. Widespread interest surrounds the possibility that they might get even more destructive in the future. Policy makers consider it a call for action. Answers about when and by how much hurricanes will change are sought by financial institutions especially industry. And scientists are challenged by the range and interactions of the processes involved. This book, arising from the 2nd International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change, contains new research on topics related to hurricanes and climate change since the 1st Summit. Chapters are grouped into research studies using global climate models and those taking empirical and statistical approaches. The latter include investigations of basin-wide and regional hurricane activity.
This volume constitutes the results of the International Conference on Underwater Environment, MOQESM'14, held at "Le Quartz" Conference Center in Brest, France, on October 14-15, 2014, within the framework of the 9th Sea Tech Week, International Marine Science and Technology Event. The objective of MOQESM'14 was to bring together researchers from both academia and industry, interested in marine robotics and hydrography with application to the coastal environment mapping and underwater infrastructures surveys. The common thread of the conference is the combination of technical control, perception, and localization, typically used in robotics, with the methods of mapping and bathymetry. The papers presented in this book focus on two main topics. Firstly, coastal and infrastructure mapping is addressed, focusing not only on hydrographic systems, but also on positioning systems, bathymetry, and remote sensing. The proposed methods rely on acoustic sensors such as side scan sonars, multibeam echo sounders, phase-measuring bathymetric sonars, as well as optical systems such as underwater laser scanners. Accurate underwater positioning is also addressed in the case of the use of a single acoustic beacon, and the latest advances in increasing the vertical precision of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are also presented. Most of the above mentioned works are closely related to autonomous marine vehicles. Consequently, the second part of the book describes some works concerning the methods associated with such type of vehicles. The selected papers focus on autonomous surface or underwater vehicles, detailing new approaches for localization, modeling, control, mapping, obstacle detection and avoidance, surfacing, and software development. Some of these works imply acoustics sensing as well as image processing. Set membership methods are also used in some papers. The applications of the work presented in this book concern in particular oceanography, monitoring of oil and gas infrastructures, and military field.
This book summarizes the recent research development concerning olive oil wastewater management: characterization, environmental impact, recovery and treatment. The book combines different chapters on the management of olive oil rejects using simple techniques with low investment and operating costs. The main focus of the book is: - Diagnosis, impacts of olive oil waste, and regulations- The valorization of the margins and the olive waste- Wastewater treatment and recovery- Evaluation of investments and operating costs of treatment techniques- Shaped by experience, the authors present their view and approach to each focus area of managing liquid and solid waste produced by crushing units.
This book reviews the latest information on the assessment of surface and groundwater resources in Algeria. The authors cover a large diversity of topics, including the status and assessment of water resources, impacts of pesticides, soil droughts, analysis of flood characteristics, hydrogeological investigations and modeling applications, and evapotranspiration. Special attention is given to the impacts of climate changes on water resources. The assessment methods present in this book can be used or adapted to study other regions of North Africa, Middle East and/or in the Mediterranean with similar climate conditions as Algeria. This book and the companion volume Water Resources in Algeria - Part II: Water Quality, Treatment, Protection and Development will appeal to engineers, researchers, graduate students and policymakers interested in the field of groundwater and surface water assessment.
Distantearthquakesarewellknowntoinduceawiderangeofresponsesinsurface water and groundwater. These responses are often viewed as mere curiositiesas theiroccurrenceislimitedinspaceandtime.Thefrequentemphasisonearthquake precursorsinstudiesofthesephenomenaalsotendstopushthestudyof'earthquake hydrology' away from the mainstream of geoscience. The observed phenomena, however,probetheinteractionbetweenhydrogeologicalprocessesandmechanical deformationintheshallowcrust.Hencetheyprovideinsightintotheinteraction among water cycle, tectonics, and properties of the crust. As such, the study of earthquakehydrologyalsohasthepotentialtoprovideamorequantitativeand- depthunderstandingofthenatureofearthquakeprecursorsandevaluatewhether theyareinfactprecursors. The title of this book re ects the nature of the connections we address: we focus on how earthquakes affect hydrology. Water also in uences earthquakes as it affects the strength of faults and the rheology of rocks. Our emphasis here, however, is not on the hydrology of earthquakes, but on understanding the hydrological phenomena induced or modi ed by earthquakes. The boundary betweenthe'hydrologyofearthquakes'andthe'earthquake-inducedhydrological phenomena', however, can sometimes be blurred. For example, triggered ear- quakes are sometimes explained by a re-distribution of pore pressure following the triggering earthquake. Hence, triggered seismicity may be an example of an earthquake-induced hydrological phenomenon. Thestudyofthelatter,therefore, canbeimportanttowardsabetterunderstandingofthemechanicsofatleastsome earthquakes. Therearemanystudents,postdocsandcolleagueswewishtothankforcolla- ratingonresearchprojectsrelatedtothetopicsreviewedinthisbook,orparticip- inginstimulatingdiscussionsintheclasswetaughtcalled'Earthquakehydrology'. In particular, we wish to thank Emily Brodsky, Yeeping Chia, Douglas Dreger, Shemin Ge, Fu-qiong Huang, Tom Holzer, Chris Huber, Joel Rowland, Martin Saar, Yaolin Shi, Chung-Ho Wang, Kelin Wang, Pei-ling Wang and Alex Wong forenlighteningexchanges.HunterPhilsonhelpedwith guresandtheindex.We v vi Preface alsothanktheNationalScienceFoundation,theMillerInstituteforBasicResearch inScience,andNASAforsupportingtheresearchandsynthesisinthisvolume.
This book provides a world-wide perspective of submarine mass movements and their consequences. This book is of interest to any researcher in the field of marine and coastal geo-hazards. It will be useful for planners, scientists and engineers involved in the development of offshore and near-shore resources and also to those in charge of the management and mitigation of coastal hazards. For graduate students, this book provides an up-to-date vision of the process of submarine mass movements and their consequences from both a scientific and an engineering standpoint, and it includes a unique collection of the existing literature on marine geo-hazards. This volume contains a DVD-Rom with full colour versions of figures which are printed in black-and-white in the book.
The African Seas include marginal basins of two major oceans, the Atlantic and the Indian, a miniature ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and an infant ocean, the Red Sea. Understanding the wide spectrum of environmental features and processes of such a varied collection of marine and coastal regions requires that in situ observation systems be integrated and actually guided, by the application of orbital remote sensing techniques. This volume reviews the current potential of Earth Observations to help in the exploration of the marginal seas around Africa, by virtue of both passive and active techniques, working in several spectral ranges - i.e. measuring either reflected visible and near-infrared sunlight, as well as surface emissions in the thermal infrared and microwave spectral regions, or again the surface reflection of transmitted lidar or radar impulses of visible or microwave radiation. The in-depth evaluation of the advantages offered by each technique and spectral region and in particular by the development of advanced multi-technique systems, contributes to the assessment of the abundant natural resources that the Seas of Africa have to offer, of those in dear need of being - sustainably - exploited and of others that should be protected and maintained in their still pristine conditions.
This book focuses on motions of incompressible ?uids of a freely moving surface being in?uenced by both the Earth's rotation and density strati?cation. In contrast to traditional textbooks in the ?eld of geophysical ?uid dynamics, such as those by by Cushman-Roisin (1994) and Gill (1982), this book uses the method of proce- oriented hydrodynamic modelling to illustrate a rich variety of ?uid phenomena. To this end, the reader can adopt the model codes, found on the Springer server accompanying this book, to reproduce most graphs of this book and, even better, to create animation movies. The reader can also employ the codes as templates for own independent studies. This can be done by a lay person as a hobby activity, undergraduate or postgraduate students as part of their education, or professional scientists as part of research. Exercises of this book are run with open-source software that can be freely downloaded from the Internet. This includes the FORTRAN 95 compiler "G95" used for execution of model simulations, the data visualisation program "SciLab", and "ImageMagick" for the creation of graphs and GIF animations, which can be watched with most Internet browsers.
The main objective of the Water Framework Directive in the
European countries is to achieve a good status of all the water
bodies, in the integrated management of river basins. In order to
assess the impact of improvement measures, water quality models are
necessary. During the previous decades the progress in computer
technology and computational methods has supported the development
of advanced mathematical models for pollutant transport in rivers
and streams. This book is intended to provide the fundamental
knowledge needed for a deeper understanding of these models and the
development of new ones, which will fulfil future quality
requirements in water resources management. This book focuses on
the fundamentals of computational techniques required in water
quality modelling. Advection, dispersion and concentrated sources or sinks of
contaminants lead to the formulation of the fundamental
differential equation of pollutant transport. Its integration,
according to appropriate initial and boundary conditions and with
the knowledge of the velocity field, allows for pollutant behaviour
to be assessed in the entire water body. An analytical integration
is convenient only in one-dimensional approach with considerable
simplification. Integration in the numerical field is useful for
taking into account particular aspects of water body and
pollutants. To ensure their reliability, the models require accurate
calibration and validation, based on proper data, taken from direct
measurements. In addition, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis are
also of utmost importance. All the above items are discussed in detail in the 21 chapters of the book, which is written in a didactic form for professionals and students. " |
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