Hydrology
Dealing with the natural resources of our
environment, both in management
capacities for present needs and safety and
in planning for the future available
resources, is the responsibility of
water resource engineers. Working in the
fields of Hydrology and Hydraulics,
water resource engineers help to guarantee
the availability and quality of
public water supplies and the timely handling of
excess water, in any of its
forms. Water resource engineering includes the
analysis of water supply,
treatment and storage, watershed management, which
includes surface and
ground water hydrology and hydrogeology, urban / rural
rainfall and run-off
analyses, and stormwater management and master drainage
plans. The last
function of water resource engineering is wastewater treatment
and disposal,
which includes sewage collection, treatment and disposal systems,
sanitary
sewer systems construction, inspection and rehabilitation, and sewage
pumping
stations collection, storage and treatment of urban run-off. Water
resource
engineering mainly falls in the fields of Hydrology and
Hydraulics.
Hydrology is the study of the sources and natural flows of
water, whether it be
underground, watershed runoff, snowpack, etc. The
practice in this field is the
planning and management of the available
resources, whatever their form.
Hydraulics is the study of both confined
and unconfined fluid flow phenomena,
and the designing of engineered systems
to utilize such fluid properties as
head, pressure, and velocity.
Hydrological research in its widest sense
comprises the circulation of water
in nature under the influence of climatic
variability and of man's actions
concerning the exploitation and control of the
water resources. A
quantitative model description of the circulation of water is
central as a
background for the analysis of groundwater contamination,
environmental
effects of groundwater recovery, soil erosion, flooding, drought,
and the
interaction of areal use and water resources. Hydrology can be divided
into
two main areas: groundwater hydrology and surface water
hydrology.
Groundwater hydrology includes the flow and transport
processes in saturated and
unsaturated soil, including laboratory experiments
and field investigations
describing the exhaustive physical or chemical
processes and the development of
mathematical or numerical model systems. The
focus of groundwater hydrology is
especially upon the effect of
heterogeneities in the subsurface (for example
stone, clay or sand lenses and
macropores), dispersion and solution of oil
contamination in soil, coupling
between chemical processes and transport, and
definition of model parameters
by optimization and validation of models. A
prevailing part of the research
resources will also in the future be
concentrated on groundwater research
with the main theme being flow and
transport modeling in heterogeneous
aquifers including scale-dependent model
description, geochemical modeling,
inverse modeling, and modeling of multi-phase
transport (oil contamination).
New, important areas are transport of pesticides,
estimation of model
uncertainties, and optimization of remediation initiatives
at point sources.
On the other hand, surface water hydrology includes the
planning,
development, and management of the water resources. It focuses on
the
understanding and model description of the global, regional, and
local
interaction between atmosphere, soil, water, and vegetation, including
the
change of precipitation to evaporation, the creation and run-off of
groundwater.
Research in water resources and hydraulic engineering
includes problems in the
hydrodynamic modeling of free surface flows, the
dynamics of ice formation and
transport in rivers and oceans, remote sensing
of sea ice dynamics, the
spreading of oil and other chemical spills, modeling
deep water oil/gas jets and
plumes, and mathematical modeling of oil spills
on rivers and oceans. Hydraulic
engineering also deals with fluid statics,
fluid dynamics, pipe flow, open
channel flow, the design of various hydraulic
structures, measurements, and
model studies. The following are water
resources engineering case studies. Water
Quality Modeling of Lake West
Point West Point Reservoir, on the Chattahoochee
River downstream of
metro Atlanta, is subject to algal production and blooms due
to excessive
nutrient loadings that need to be evaluated and controlled. The
2D
hydrodynamic and water quality model CE-QUAL-W2 is being calibrated and
applied
to West Point Reservoir with the goal of assisting Georgia EPD in
developing
total Maximum Daily Loadings (TMDL's) of nutrients in order to
meet water
quality standards in the reservoir. The effect of using different
temporal
scales for model inputs is being investigated, and the impact of
reduced
phosphorus loading on reservoir water quality will be evaluated over
a
multi-year period. Use of Satellite Information in Modeling Runoff,
Erosion, and
Non-point Source Pollution for Large Watersheds This project
focuses on
assessing the value of using satellite sensed weather and land
cover/land use
for the management of large watersheds (*1000 km 2). The
project includes four
major components: (1) estimation of rain using
satellite images, (2) runoff
modeling using distributed watershed models, (3)
erosion modeling and sediment
transport, and (4) modeling of non point source
pollution loads. Case studies
will be conducted for the Southeastern US and
the Lake Victoria
Basin.
Bibliography
http://vig.prenhall.com/acadbook/0,2581,0131766031,00.html
http://www.ce.gatech.edu/~water/research.html#efm11
http://cu.clarkson.edu/education/engineering/cee/NavMenu/Graduate/Areasofstudy/HydraulicsWR.htm
http://www.isva.dtu.dk/research.htm#hydrology
http://www.civil.utah.edu/~blaser/MM_project/water/index.html
http://www.gamsby.com/water.htm