Hydraulic and Environmental

Engineering

Have you ever seen Sun in 3D? NASA’s Stereo mission is taken picture in 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light from two different satellites to build 3-D solar shape by using stereo reconstruction. Main purpose is to reveal the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections, that affects satellites functionality and life on planet earth.

NASA publishes video and images of 3D stereo reconstruction of Sun. NASA suggests also how to make by your own 3D glasses to visualize our star’s perspective.

3D solar sequences are incredible!

This is really cool: a forecasting system of Chemical Weather!

CETEMPS center of University of Aquila (Italy) developed an integrated system that mounts a chemistry-transport model over a meteorological model (Chemical Weather Forecast). The result is the 48-h forecast of the evolution and transformation of chemical species, such as PM10, Pm25, Ozone, Nitrogen Dioxide, Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Dioxide.

I paste it a short description of Forecast System, taken from CETMPS web-site.

Our system for the forecast of regional air quality relies on two main elements: a meteorological mesoscale model (the PennState/NCAR MM5 model) and a regional chemistry-transport model (CHIMERE model).

MM5 model is developed at the Pennsylvania State University and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and is available for free. The meteorological model provides input data such as winds, temperature and humidity necessary to run the model of transport and chemistry. The meteo model is forced by daily ECMWF forecast and run on a grid with an horizontal resolution of 30 km.

The forecast of the evolution and transformation of chemical species is provided by the CHIMERE model. CHIMERE is developed in Paris (France) by a number of french institutions: Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace, C.N.R.S., INERIS, LISA (C.N.R.S.). It is a free software available under the GNU General Public License. In our system the model runs on a grid of 0.5° × 0.5° longitude × latitude. The initial condition of the atmospheric composition is provided by the simulation of the previous day. Boundary conditions are provided by a climatology derived from 10 years of simulation of the global models LMDz-INCA for gases and GOCART for aerosols. The emission inventory is a combination of data from: EMEP (Yearly totals), IER (Time variations), TNO (Aerosol emissions), UK Dept of Environment (VOC speciation).

Everyday a 72h run is performed starting at h 12:00 of the previous day. The MM5 meteo model is run first and then its output is used by the chemical model CHIMERE to predict pollutant levels over Italy and surroundings. At the end of the simulation process another automatic procedure updates the figures visible on this web site.

DHI released the new MATLAB DFS interface library. This is a major extension compared to the previous version (2004). The new version supports e.g. read and write of flexible mesh data (dfsu 2D and 3D).

From DHIgroup website, I see that th new MATLAB DFS interface provides different levels of support for different file types:

• dfs0: read, write, create

• dfs1, dfs2 ,dfs3: read only

• dfsu 2D and 3D: read and write

• mesh files and xyz files: read and create

This Matlab toolbox is a good point for all DHI software and Matlab users who want to exploit Matlab built-in functions to manage and visualize multi-dimensional data.

The matlab code and an user guide can be downladed here and here.

Just a brief post, especially for (but not only) Venetian friends interested in water resources: ARPAV (Environmental Protection Agency of the Veneto Region) has published its Atlas of Springs of the Veneto Region (in Italian only), an interesting collection of water sources distributed in our territory. Useful not only for professional purposes, but also for recreative ones (most of the springs are located in idyllic spots in mountain or hilly areas of the regional territory). The Atlas can also help hikers to find some good refreshment during their trips! As usual, it is freely downloadable.

I have already posted on Oceanographic Modelling.

My primary interest is in coupling meteorological and hydrodynamical mathematical models to forecast storm surges and wave conditions in near-shore areas. Venetian MOSE project involves knowledge, among others, of tides in Venice Lagoon and wave conditions at three Venice Lagoon inlets.

Surfing on the web I saw that City of Venice Administration has its own Tidal Level forecasting center, where the water levels are achieved by a statistic model, based on the meteorological forecasts from the ECMWF centre of Reading. And it is all!!

But, wait a minute. Billion of Euros spent to project the whole gates system and to support the managing just a statistical model.

In fact, this is not all. Just a little bit hidden, but a deterministic model exists: a ECMWF-MIKE21 coupled model for a 48-hours forecasting.

My colleagues did not know it, and you?

Image Analysis techniques are used for retrieving water surface wave field spatially and temporally from CCD-images and CCD-image-sequences. The technique developed utilizes binocular stereogrammetry to recover topographic information from a sequence of synchronous, overlapping video images. The complete geometrical method is given, including the derivation of a relationship relating the geometry of the stereo rig and the expected quantization errors. At the end, the 3-D calculated scattered points give the complete spatio-temporal distribution of the water surface elevations. The measurable length-scales depend on the pixel resolution, “filtered” by the triangulation process, and the acquisition frame rate. The results are compared to in-situ sensor for validation. Measurements in field campaigns indicate that the approach is both accurate and applicable for measuring surface water waves. Moreover, in the water wave measurement scenario stereo analysis shows new potentialities to investigate the shape of the water surface and the dynamics of the oceanographic phenomena. (more…)

These days dam removal is a hot subject. Even Wired News talks about it.
First, some data: about 800000 dams in the world, and 45000 higher than 15m; a majority of them has been built after world war II, i.e. in other words, they are quite old, in average. Let’s add the well-known fact that energy is a key point in actual economical and geo-political problems, even if in this post we won’t consider too much these issues; just remember that hydroelectric energy is 20% of worldwide energy production.
(more…)

Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of child labour worldwide. Every day 132 million children 5-14 years of age are forced to work the land, often in unhealthy and hazardous conditions. A FAO report reveals it.
I’m a Brand New Dad, so…

If you are tired of Italian burocracy, or if your boss shout more than necessary, and you want to change place and country, don’t forget to visit www.jobs.ac.uk

All about academic vacancy in UK and commonwealth. I found it an interesting vacancy for Environmental Engineering Lecturer at UCL, but no luck!

Waves forecasting is a quite recent issue in mathematical modelling and forecasting.
Integrating meterological models (global and locals) to forecast wind and pressure maps, wave models can predict the waves heights, waves directions, and wave periods.
An interesting contribution is given by the Environmental Authority of the Italian region Emilia Romagna (ARPA emr).
What they did is using the outupts of meteorological model LIMA (i.e. the 10 m above water surface wind speed) as input for SWAN wave model..
In particular, Adriatic Sea is discretized in a bathymetry grid of 1/60°, and the computational grid is 1/12° spaced.
Published results are wave heights map for next 48 hours.
Sea state modelling reliability can be found here.