Description: The latest Version-7 (V7) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) products were released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in December of 2012. Their performance on different climatology, locations, and precipitation types is of great interest to the satellite-based precipitation community. This paper presents a study of TMPA precipitation products (3B42RT and 3B42V7) for an extreme precipitation event in Beijing and its adjacent regions (from 00:00 UTC 21 July 2012 to 00:00 UTC 22 July 2012). Measurements from a dense rain gauge network were used as the ground truth to evaluate the latest TMPA products. Results are summarized as follows. Compared to rain gauge measurements, both 3B42RT and 3B42V7 generally captured the rainfall spatial and temporal pattern, having a moderate spatial correlation coefficient (CC, 0.6) and high CC values (0.88) over the broader Hebei, Beijing and Tianjin (HBT) regions, but the rainfall peak is 6 h ahead of gauge observations. Overall, 3B42RT showed higher estimation than 3B42V7 over both HBT and Beijing. At the storm center, both 3B42RT and 3B42V7 presented a relatively large deviation from the temporal variation of rainfall and underestimated the storm by 29.02% and 36.07%, respectively. The current study suggests that the latest TMPA products still have limitations in terms of resolution and accuracy, especially for this type of extreme event within a latitude area on the edge of coverage of TRMM precipitation radar and microwave imager. Therefore, TMPA users should be cautious when 3B42RT and 3B42V7 are used to model, monitor, and forecast both flooding hazards in the Beijing urban area and landslides in the mountainous west and north of Beijing.

Description: Traditional inter-event time definition (IETD) estimate methodologies generally take into account only rainfall characteristics and not drainage basin characteristics. Therefore, they may not succeed in providing an appropriate value of IETD for any sort of application to the design of urban drainage system devices. To overcome this limitation, this study presents a method of IETD determination that considers basin characteristics. The suggested definition of IETD is the time period from the end of a rainfall event to the end of a direct runoff. The suggested method can identify the independent events that are suitable for the statistical analysis of the recorded rainfall. Using the suggested IETD, the IETD of the Joong-Rang drainage system was determined and the area-IETD relation curve was drawn. The resulting regression curve can be used to determinate the IETD of ungauged urban drainage systems, with areas ranging between 40 and 4400 ha. Using the regression curve, the IETDs and time distribution of the design rainfall for four drainage systems in Korea were determined and rainfall-runoff simulations were performed with the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). The results were compared with those from Huff's method which assumed a six-hour IETD. The peak flow rates obtained by the suggested method were 11%~15% greater than those obtained by Huff’s method. The suggested IETD determination method can identify independent events that are suitable for the statistical analysis of the recorded rainfall aimed at the design of urban drainage system devices.

Description: An integrated water environment management system is necessary in improving water quality, properly allocating water resources, and supporting socio-economic development. Specifically, dynamic modeling can be an efficient approach to accomplish this system. This paper aims to construct a dynamic linear optimization model to reflect a water environment management system which includes three sub-models with consideration of their interrelationships (a socio-economic model based on dynamic Input-Output model, a water resources cycle model, and a water pollutants flow model). Based on simulation, the model can precisely estimate trends of water utilization, water quality, and economic development under certain management targets, and propose an optimal plan. Taking Tianjin as a target area, this study utilized the model to analyze the potential of using reclaimed water to accomplish local water environment management and sustainable development plan while exploring the applicable approaches. This study indicates that the constructed water environment management system can be effective and easily adopted to assess water resources and environment while improving the trade-off between economic and environment development, as well as formulate regional development plan.

Description: Efforts to observe humans in relation to nature over time and at large scale are few and disjointed in ways that impede progress in building scientific foundations for sustainability. Two water-oriented national-scale case studies highlight the challenges of integrating existing natural system and social system data: one concerns the influence of environmental attitudes and water quality on water conservation efforts; the other explores relationships between environmental attitudes, water quality and recreation behavior. The case studies show that coupled research conducted at large scale can yield new insights, but uncoordinated data limit meaningful inference. We propose salient features of a coordinated observation program for water.

Description: The consumption of alkaline reduced water produced by domestic electrolysis devices was approved in Japan in 1965 by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare for the cure of gastro-intestinal disorders. Today, these devices are freely available in several countries and can be easily purchased without reserve. The commercial information included with the device recommends the consumption of 1–1.5 L of water per day, not only for gastro-intestinal disorders but also for numerous other illnesses such as diabetes, cancer, inflammation, etc. Academic research in Japan on this subject has been undergoing since 1990 only but has established that the active ingredient is dissolved dihydrogen that eliminates the free radical HO• in vivo. In addition, it was demonstrated that degradation of the electrodes during functioning of the device releases very reactive nanoparticles of platinum, the toxicity of which has not yet been clearly proven. This report recommends alerting health authorities of the uncontrolled availability of these devices used as health products, but which generate drug substances and should therefore be sold according to regulatory requirements.

Description: Vegetation in riparian zones has a significant influence on resistance, velocity distribution and turbulence intensity. This study experimentally investigated the effect of emergent bending riparian zone vegetation on the flow. The results showed that the frond and stem parts of Acorus calami had different influences on hydraulic features and that the relative depth ratio of water depth h to stem height hs was a key determinant of those influences. Manning coefficient n varied greatly with the variation of vegetation densities, relative depth ratio of water depth h to stem height hs, Re and Fr. Manning coefficient n increased with increasing vegetation density, particularly in cases when h/hs > 1. The velocity distributions did not follow logarithmic profiles, but they instead exhibited double logarithmic profiles. In addition, vegetation characteristics were shown to influence the height of maximum velocity. The position of maximum velocity is further away from the bed in cases with denser vegetation distribution. Finally, turbulence intensity showed more significant variation in the stem part and peaked near the middle of the stem, at z/hs = 0.5, where z was the distance from the bottom.

Description: Green infrastructure (GI) design is advocated as a new paradigm for stormwater management, whereas current knowledge of GI design is mostly based on isolated design strategies used at small-scale sites. This study presents empirical findings from two watershed-scale community projects (89.4 km2 and 55.7 km2) in suburban Houston, Texas. The GI development integrates a suite of on-site, infiltration-based stormwater management designs, and an adjacent community development follows conventional drainage design. Parcel data were used to estimate the site impervious cover area. Observed streamflow and water quality data (i.e., NO3-N, NH3-N, and TP) were correlated with the site imperviousness. Results show that, as of 2009, the impervious cover percentage in the GI site (32.3%) is more than twice that of the conventional site (13.7%). However, the GI site’s precipitation-streamflow ratio maintains a steady, low range, whereas this ratio fluctuates substantially in the conventional site, suggesting a “flashy” stream condition. Furthermore, in the conventional site, annual nutrient loadings are significantly correlated with its impervious cover percentage (p 〈 0.01), whereas in the GI site there is little correlation. The study concludes that integrated GI design can be effective in stormwater runoff reduction and water quality enhancement at watershed-scale community development.

Description: This article reports the outcome of a performance study of the water service provision industry in Italy. The study evaluates the efficiency of 21 “private or public-private” equity and 32 “public” equity water service operators and investigates controlling factors. In particular, the influence that the operator typology and service management nature - private vs. public - has on efficiency is assessed. The study employed a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis methodology. In the first stage, the operational efficiency of water supply operators is calculated by implementing a conventional BCC DEA model, that uses both physical infrastructure and financial input and output variables to explore economies of scale. In the second stage, bootstrapped DEA and Tobit regression are performed to estimate the influence that a number of environmental factors have on water supplier efficiency. The results show that the integrated water provision industry in Italy is characterized by operational inefficiencies of service operators, and scale and agglomeration economies may have a not negligible effect on efficiency. In addition, the operator typology and its geographical location affect efficiency.

Description: There is one mistake in this article [1]. On page 753, line 12, the phrase “(application load of 80 tons/ha)” should be “(application load of 80 kg/ha)”.

Description: On-line monitoring of wastewater parameters is a major scientific and technical challenge because of the great variability of wastewater characteristics and the extreme physical-chemical conditions that endure the sensors. Wastewater treatment plant managers require fast and reliable information about the input sewage and the operation of the different treatment stages. There is a great need for the development of sensors for the continuous monitoring of wastewater parameters. In this sense, several optical systems have been evaluated. This article presents an experimental laboratory-based approach to quantify commonly employed urban wastewater parameters, namely biochemical oxygen demand in five days (BOD5), chemical oxygen demand (COD), total suspended solids (TSS), and the ratio BOD5:COD, with a visible and short wave near infrared (V/SW-NIR) spectrometer (400–1000 nm). Partial least square regression (PLSR) models were developed in order to quantify the wastewater parameters with the recorded spectra. PLSR models were developed for the full spectral range and also for the visible and near infrared spectral ranges separately. Good PLSR models were obtained with the visible spectral range for BOD5 (RER = 9.64), COD (RER = 10.88), and with the full spectral range for the TSS (RER = 9.67). The results of this study show that V/SW-NIR spectroscopy is a suitable technique for on-line monitoring of wastewater parameters.