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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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Predicting river turbidity in Pine Island Bayou using machine learning techniques coupled with variational mode decomposition
Elevated turbidity levels pose significant public health risks by facilitating the transport of harmful pollutants, including metals, organic compounds, and pathogenic microorganisms into the surface water. These conditions create serious challenges for public recreational water use and drinking water treatment, leading to economic losses and health risks. This study utilizes water monitoring data in Pine Island Bayou, Texas, and develops a Sequence-to-Sequence (S2S) model to predict turbidity using Attention-based Gated Recurrent Units with Encoder-Decoder (AT-GRU-ED) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), coupled with Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD). Compared to the model without VMD, the model demonstrates satisfactory 72-hour turbidity prediction performance, achieving MAEs of 2.60 and 3.29 NTU (reductions of 53% and 58%), RMSEs of 21.08 and 31.49 NTU (reductions of 82% and 80%), and R² values of 0.96 and 0.84 on the validation and test sets, respectively. Feature importance analysis reveals that water temperature is the dominant factor influencing seasonal turbidity patterns, while real-time hourly rainfall significantly contributes to short-term variability. Turbidity typically peaks within 48 hours after rainfall events due to lagged effects from surface runoff and upstream flow. Findings suggest suspending recreational water use and water supply pumping for three days after heavy rainfall can benefit public health and improve water treatment processes. Discharges above 100 m3/s are found to accelerate sediment dilution and transport, reducing turbidity levels more quickly after the peak. In conclusion, the proposed model demonstrates reliable 72-hour turbidity prediction, supporting decision-making for water treatment plant operations and providing early warning for public recreational water use.
Implications of warming on western United States landfalling atmospheric rivers and their flood damages
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Dam Operations and Subsurface Hydrogeology Control Dynamics of Hydrologic Exchange Flows in a Regulated River Reach
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Upstream and Downstream Boundary Conditions Control the Physical and Biological Development of River Deltas
Relative sea level rise is depleting coastal land. Success in coastal restoration depends on understanding interactions between physical and biological processes that influence landscape change. We present results from flume experiments examining the coevolution of vegetation and delta channel networks. We show that channel mobility—controlled by upstream and downstream boundary conditions and delta size—controls vegetation colonization. The spatial patterns of plants in turn control the stability and spatial distribution of channels. Experiments with low–channel mobility develop large, dense plant patches that become denser over time and stabilize channels. Experiments with more mobile channels have sparse vegetation patterns that limit vegetation growth within existing patches, maintaining sparse, patchy vegetation. Thus, the ecogeomorphic development of deltas depends on the rate of channel lateral migration and avulsion, suggesting that upstream and downstream boundary conditions control both the physical and biological evolution of coastal landscapes.
Arctic River Delta Morphologic Variability and Implications for Riverine Fluxes to the Coast
Arctic riverine fluxes are anticipated to increase as the Arctic warms and have a large impact on the Arctic ocean. Deltas modify the spatial and temporal distributions of riverine fluxes, but no thorough studies have been conducted to analyze Arctic delta morphologies to determine their influence on land–ocean fluxes. We performed an analysis of six high–latitude deltas (Colville, Kolyma, Lena, Mackenzie, Yenisei, and Yukon) to characterize delta morphologies and determine the influence of morphology on the distribution of fluxes to the coast. All six deltas deliver material to the coast at discrete locations across small areas despite differences in delta shoreline length. Large Arctic deltas exhibit large variability in channel width, which we hypothesize is due to a feedback with ice cover and retreat that favors the growth of large channels over geologic timescales. Spatial variability in island sizes suggests variability in channel activity, island nourishment, and susceptibility to drowning by sea level rise. Potential lake storage is highest on the Mackenzie delta, thus providing a means for reducing nutrient and sediment loading of the coastal ocean. Here, the connected lakes are also prevalent on the Colville and Yukon deltas, suggesting that these deltas can filter riverine fluxes even when the deltas are not flooded. Differences in Arctic delta morphologies can be explained by varying levels of riverine and marine influence, antecedent topography, and local channel dynamics. Ice cover also plays a large role in controlling Arctic delta morphologies and dynamics that has not been previously represented in interpretations of existing delta metrics.
Efficiency of the Summer Monsoon in Generating Streamflow Within a Snow‐Dominated Headwater Basin of the Colorado River
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Self‐Potential Tomography Preconditioned by Particle Swarm Optimization—Application to Monitoring Hyporheic Exchange in a Bedrock River
Abstract A self‐potential (SP) data‐inversion algorithm was developed and tested on an analytical model of electrical‐potential profile data attributed to single and multiple polarized electrical sources. The developed algorithm was then validated by an application to SP‐monitoring field data measured on the floodplain of East Fork Poplar Creek, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to image electrical sources in areas conducive to preferential flow into the flood plain from the bedrock‐lined riverbed. The algorithm combined stochastic source‐localization by particle‐swarm‐optimization (PSO) of electrical sources characterized by simplified geometries with source tomography by regularized weighted least‐squares minimization of a quadratic objective function. Prior information was incorporated by preconditioning the tomography algorithm by PSO results. Variable percentages of random noise were added to analytical‐model data to evaluate the algorithm performance. Results indicated that true parameters of single‐source models were inverted and approximated with small residual error, whereas inversion of analytical‐model data representing multiple electrical sources accurately approximated the locations of the sources but miscalculated some parameters because of the non‐uniqueness of the inverse‐model solution. Source tomography applied to analytical model data during testing produced a spatially continuous parameter field that identified the locations of point‐scale synthetic dipole sources of electrical current flow with varying degrees of accuracy depending on the prior information incorporated into the tomography. When applied to SP‐monitoring field data, the algorithm imaged electrical sources within a known fault that intersects the bedrock riverbed and flood plain of East Fork Poplar Creek and depicted dynamic electrical conditions attributed to hyporheic exchange.
Assessing the Role of Hydrodynamics in Enhancing Height-Above-the-Nearest-Drainage Derived Synthetic Rating Curves: A Comparative Study in the Wu River Basin, Taiwan
The conventional approach to generating synthetic rating curves (SRC) using the Height-Above-the-Nearest-Drainage (HAND) method typically relies on the assumption of uniform flow, such as Manning's equation, to establish stage-discharge ratings. The zero-physics application of the uniform flow equation is insufficient for capturing detailed hydraulic features (e.g., backwater effect) and neglects the hydraulic effects from adjacent channels. This lack of hydrodynamic computation can impact the accuracy and effectiveness of riverine flood risk estimation and management. To reduce this foreseeable error, we introduce the HAND-hd workflow, which integrates sophisticated hydrodynamic computations in the production of HAND-based SRC with hydrodynamic features (SRC hd ). The results indicate that SRC hd demonstrates consistent agreement with both gauge observations and benchmark solutions. Additionally, the comparative analysis suggests that SRC hd provides notable improvements in stage-discharge ratings over conventional HAND-based SRCs, particularly in channels with mild bed gradients, where it reduces water stage prediction errors and percent biases. In steeper channel segments, SRC hd maintains comparable accuracy to conventional methods. The comprehensive evaluation in this study emphasizes the potential discrepancies and inaccuracies associated with the adoption of the uniform flow assumption in the conventional HAND-SRCs and addresses the necessity of including hydrodynamic physics in the application of HAND-based SRC (e.g., inundation map) in channels with mild gradients.
Snake River Plain Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis - Volcanic Vents, Lacustrine Sediments, and post-Miocene Faults KMZ files
This dataset contain raw data files in kmz files (Google Earth georeference format). These files include volcanic vent locations and age, the distribution of fine-grained lacustrine sediments (which act as both a seal and an insulating layer for hydrothermal fluids), and post-Miocene faults compiled from the Idaho Geological Survey, the USGS Quaternary Fault database, and unpublished mapping. It also contains the Composite Common Risk Segment Map created during Phase 1 studies, as well as a file with locations of select deep wells used to interrogate the subsurface.
Snake River Plain Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis Project Active Source Seismic Data
This archive contains seismic shot field records for 10 profiles located in Camas Prairie, Idaho. The eight numbered .sgy files were acquired using a seismic land streamer system with an accelerated weight drop source and 72 geophones. These 10-Hz geophones were mounted on base plates and dragged behind the seismic source. Shots were acquired every 4 meters along the length of lines 500West, 550 West, 600West, 700West, 800West, 900West, 200South and 200North. The objective was to map stratigraphy and structures related to geothermal fluid flow in the upper few hundred meters. A readme file is included with descriptions of individual files. The lines names refer to to roads which are numbered relative to the distance from the county seat (the town of Fairfield) along the the main highways. For example, 500 West implies that this north-south street crosses the main road 5 miles to the west of town. The included geologic, topographic, and aerial maps show the labeled seismic lines, while the regional map shows only the line geometry and regional faulting.
Snake River Plain Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis Project MT Data
MT is measured in the field by using induction coils to measure the time-varying magnetic source for frequencies between 1000-0.001~Hz, and electric dipoles to measure the Earth's electrical response. Because the magnetic source field is polarized, orthogonal directions of the fields need to be measured to get a complete description of the fields. In all measurements collected for this project, induction coils and electric dipoles were aligned with geomagnetic north and east. MT data were collected at 22 stations with a ZEN 32-bit data logger developed by Zonge International, magnetic fields were measured with ANT-4 induction coils, and electric fields where measured with Ag-AgCl reference electrodes from Borin on 50~m dipoles. The data was collected on a repeating schedule of 10~min at 4096~samples/s and 7 hours and 50 minutes at 256 samples/s over a 20-24 hour period. To convert time series data into the frequency domain and get estimations of the impedance tensor, the processing code BIRRP was used (Chave & Thompson 2004). Simultaneous measurements were used as remote references to reduce noise and bias in the data. Chave, A. D., & Thomson, D. J. 2004. Bounded inuence magnetotelluric response function estimation. Geophys. J. Int., 157, 988-1006.
Time Series Surface Temperature of Variably Inundated Sediment across 30 North American Rivers
This dataset supports a broader study examining drivers of organic matter chemistry in variably inundated hyporheic zone sediments and further linking that chemistry to biogeochemical rates. The dataset provides surficial temperature time series that can be used to infer the dynamics of inundation prior to the collection of sediments. Those inferred inundation histories can then be used to help interpret variation in the organic matter chemistry. There are related data that will be published, such as FTICR-MS data on organic matter chemistry and sediment moisture. A data package with those data is forthcoming.This dataset is comprised of two folders: (1) ECA1_iButtonData and (2) ECA1_SitePhotos. The ECA1_iButtonData folder contains: (1) file-level metadata, (2) data dictionary, (3) field metadata, (4) installation methods, (5) iButton deployment protocol, (6) readme, and (7) folder of individual time series temperature csv files for each iButton sensor deployed. The ECA1_SitePhotos folder contains site photographs taken in the field. All files are .csv, .txt, .pdf, or .jpg.
Economic and Technical Feasibility Study of Utility-Scale Wind Generation for the New York Buffalo River and South Buffalo Brownfield Opportunity Areas
Through the RE-Powering America's Land initiative, the economic and technical feasibility of utilizing contaminated lands in the Buffalo, New York, area for utility-scale wind development is explored. The study found that there is available land, electrical infrastructure, wind resource, and local interest to support a commercial wind project; however, economies of scale and local electrical markets may need further investigation before significant investment is made into developing a wind project at the Buffalo Reuse Authority site.
Synthesis of multiple data structures for improved accuracy of abundance and demographic estimates form white-tailed at Savannah River Site.
The goal of this study was to provide a framework for combining existing data (from camera trapping, harvest surveys, and spotlight counts) into an integrated system that produces the most accurate estimates possible for use in setting harvest goals. A summary of the key data components that were available is included.
Bioaccumulation Using Surrogate Samplers (Bass): Evaluation Of A Passive Sampler As An Alternative Monitoring Tool For Environmental Contaminants At The Savannah River Site
DOE sites conduct traditional environmental monitoring programs that require collecting, processing, and analyzing water, sediment, and fish samples. However, recently developed passive sampling technologies, such as Diffusive Gradient in Thin films (DGT), may measure the chemical phases that are available and toxic to organisms (the bioavailable fraction), thereby producing more accurate and economical results than traditional methods. Our laboratory study showed that dissolved copper concentrations measured by DGT probes were strongly correlated with the uptake of copper by Lumbriculus variegatus, an aquatic worm, and with concentrations of copper measured by conventional methods. Dissolved copper concentrations in DGT probes increased with time of exposure, paralleling the increase in copper with time that ocurred in Lumbriculus. Additional studies with a combination of seven dissolved metals showed similar results. These findings support the use of DGT as a biomimetic monitoring tool and provide a basis for refinement of these methods for cost-effective environmental monitoring at DOE sites.
River Protection Project Technology and Innovation Roadmap.
The Technology and Innovation Roadmap is a planning tool for WRPS management, DOE ORP, DOE EM, and others to understand the risks and technology gaps associated with the RPP mission. The roadmap identifies and prioritizes technical areas that require technology solutions and underscores where timely and appropriate technology development can have the greatest impact to reduce those risks and uncertainties. The roadmap also serves as a tool for determining allocation of resources.