Thursday, March 29, 2012

Dual Drainage in SWMM 5

Subject:  Dual Drainage in SWMM 5

The purpose of the Dual Drainage tool in InfoSWMM is to create a major or street drainage network on top of an existing pipe or what is called the minor network in  dual drainage.  The created major network has a node (sometimes called the inlet node) on top of the existing minor network node connected by two  OUTLET links.  One outlet link takes the flow from the street and  passes it to the minor network node, the second outlet link  takes the surcharged minor network flow and passes it to the major network or street – the direction of flow is important (Figure 1).  The general purpose of the Captured OUTLET is to  use a head or depth equation to separate the street incoming  flow into captured flow and bypass flow

Figure 1.  Dual Drainage in General
Figure 2.  How it looks in SWMM 5 with node, outlet and conduit elements.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Bloomberg: Heat Waves, Rains Probably Linked to Warming, Scientists Say

Heat Waves, Rains Probably Linked to Warming, Scientists Say

Heat waves and extreme rainfall in the past decade are probably linked to global warming, according to a study by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“For some types of extreme, notably heat waves but also precipitation extremes, there is now strong evidence linking specific events or an increase in their number to the human influence on climate,” the scientists wrote in a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The past decade included Europe’s hottest summer in at least 500 years in 2003, according to the scientists. 2010 brought western Russia’s hottest summer in centuries and record rain in Pakistan and Australia, they wrote. Japan and some U.S. states registered all-time-high rainfall last year, while the Yangtze River basin in China had a record drought.
Basic physics exercises suggest that warming of the atmosphere leads to more extremes, according to the institute. For example, warm air can hold more moisture that may fall as rain, the scientists wrote. Computer simulations confirm the relation between warming and record temperatures and rainfall, the study showed.
The recent high incidence of weather records is “no longer normal,” according to Dim Coumou, the lead author of the study.
To contact the reporter on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter atccarpenter2@bloomberg.net

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

How to Make a SWMM 5 Calibration File from InfoSWMM

Subject:  How to Make a SWMM 5 Calibration File from InfoSWMM
1st Step:  Graph a Link  in InfoSWMM using the Date /Time Format
2nd Step:  Click on the Report Button and copy the 1st two columns of data
3rd Step:  Save the  copied columns to a data file, replace the semi colon and add the name of the link  to the top of the data file as shown below
4th Step:  Connect the created calibration data file t o the SWMM 5 Calibration Data Link Flow Rate
5th Step:  Run the  Simulation and you should see two  graphs on the screen for the designated link

How to Make a SWMM 5 Calibration File from InfoSWMM

by dickinsonre
Subject:  How to Make a SWMM 5 Calibration File from InfoSWMM 
1st Step:  Graph a Link  in InfoSWMM using the Date /Time Format
2nd Step:  Click on the Report Button and copy the 1st two columns of data
3rd Step:  Save the  copied columns to a data file, replace the semi colon and add the name of the link  to the top of the data file as shown below
4th Step:  Connect the created calibration data file t o the SWMM 5 Calibration Data Link Flow Rate
5th Step:  Run the  Simulation and you should see two  graphs on the screen for the designated link

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Past in Monsoon Changes Linked to Major Shifts in Indian Civilizations

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2012) — A fundamental shift in the Indian monsoon has occurred over the last few millennia, from a steady humid monsoon that favored lush vegetation to extended periods of drought, reports a new study led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The study has implications for our understanding of the monsoon’s response to climate change. The Indian peninsula sustains over a billion people, yet it lies at the same latitude as the Sahara Desert. Without a monsoon, most of India would be dry and uninhabitable. The ability to predict the timing and amount of the next year’s monsoon is vital, yet even our knowledge of the monsoon’s past variability remains incomplete.

One key to this understanding lies in the core monsoon zone (CMZ) – a region in the central part of India that is a very sensitive indicator of the monsoon throughout the India peninsula.
“If you know what’s happening there, you know more or less what’s happening in the rest of India,” said Camilo Ponton, a student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and lead author of the study recently published in Geophysical Research Lettersentitled "Holocene Aridification of India". “Our biggest problem has been a lack of evidence from this region to extend the short, existing records.”
The study was designed by WHOI geologist Liviu Giosan and geochemist Tim Eglinton, now at ETH in Zurich, and makes use of a sediment core collected by the National Gas Hydrate Program of India in 2006. Sailing around India aboard the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution for several months, Giosan enlisted colleagues from India and US to help with the project.  Extracted from a “sweet spot” in the Bay of Bengal where the Godavari River drains the central Indian peninsula and over which monsoon winds carry most of the precipitation, the core has provided the basis for a 10,000-year reconstruction of climate in the Indian peninsula’s CMZ .
 “We are fortunate to have this core from close to the river mouth, where it accumulates sediment very fast,” said Ponton. “Every centimeter of sediment contains 10 to 20 years’ worth of information. So it gives us the advantage of high temporal resolution to address the problems.”
When put together, the research tells the story of growing aridity in India, enables valuable insights into the impact of the monsoon on past cultures, and points scientists toward a way to model future monsoons.
To assemble the 10,000-year record, the team looked to both what the land and the ocean could tell them.  Contained within the sediment core’s layers are microscopic compounds from the trees, grasses, and shrubs that lived in the region and remnants of plankton fossils from the ocean.
 “The geochemical analyses of the leaf waxes tell a simple story,” said Giosan.  “About 10,000 years ago to about 4500 ago, the Godavari River drained mostly terrain that had humidity-loving plants. Stepwise changes starting at around 4,000 years ago and again after 1,700 years ago changed the flora toward aridity-adapted plants. That tells us that central India – the core monsoon zone – became drier.”
Analyses of the plankton fossils support the story reconstructed from plant remains and reveal a record of unprecedented spikes and troughs in the Bay of Bengal’s salinity – becoming saltier during drought periods and fresher when water from the monsoon filled the river and rained into the Bay.  Similar drought periods have been documented in shorter records from tree rings and cave stalagmites within India lending further support to this interpretation.
With a picture emerging of changes in the ancient flora of India, Giosan tapped archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller’s interest.
“What the new paleo-climatic information makes clear is that the shift towards more arid conditions around 4,000 years ago corresponds to the time when agricultural populations expanded and settled village life began,” says Fuller of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. “Arid-adapted food production is an old cultural tradition in the region, with cultivation of drought-tolerant millets and soil-restoring bean species. There may be lessons to learn here, as these drought-tolerant agricultural traditions have eroded over the past century, with shift towards more water and chemical intensive forms of modern agriculture.”
Together, the geological record and the archaeological evidence tell a story of the possible fate of India’s earliest civilizations. Cultural changes occurred across the Indian subcontinent as the climate became more arid after ~4,000 years. In the already dry Indus basin, the urban Harappan civilization failed to adapt to even harsher conditions and slowly collapsed. But aridity favored an increase in sophistication in the central and south India where tropical forest decreased in extent and people began to settle and do more agriculture. Human resourcefulness proved again crucial in the rapid proliferation of rain-collecting water tanks across the Indian peninsula, just as the long series of droughts settled in over the last 1,700 years.
What can this record tell us about future Indian monsoons? According to Ponton, “How the monsoon will behave in the future is highly controversial. Our research provides clues for modeling and that could help determine whether the monsoon will increase or decrease with global warming.”
The study found that the type of monsoon and its droughts are a function of the Northern Hemisphere’s incoming solar radiation – or “insolation.”  Every year, the band of heavy rain known as the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, moves north over India.
“We found that when the Asian continent is least heated by the sun, the northward movement of the rain appears to hesitate between the Equator and Asia, bringing less rain to the north,” said Giosan. “The fact that long droughts have not occurred over the last 100 years or so, as humans started to heat up the planet, but did occur earlier, suggest that we changed the entire monsoon game, and may have inadvertently made it more stable!”
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided byWoods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:
  1. Camilo Ponton, Liviu Giosan, Tim I. Eglinton, Dorian Q. Fuller, Joel E. Johnson, Pushpendra Kumar, Tim S. Collett.Holocene aridification of IndiaGeophysical Research Letters, 2012; 39 (3) DOI: 10.1029/2011GL050722

 APA
 MLA
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (2012, March 16). Past in monsoon changes linked to major shifts in Indian civilizations. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 17, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2012/03/120316145802.htm
 
Map of the Indian peninsula, showing where the monsoon winds blow (white arrows) and how the salinity (white lines) is lower in Bay of Bengal due to monsoon rain over the Bay and rivers draining into the it. (The black arrow represents non-monsoon wind.) The study's sediment core (red dot) was extracted from a “sweet spot” in the Bay of Bengal where the Godavari River drains the central Indian peninsula and over which monsoon winds carry the most precipitation. (Credit: Courtesy of C. Ponton and L. Giosan) 

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Importing and Comparing Simulation Results between InfoSWMM and SWMM 5

Subject:  Importing and Comparing Simulation Results between InfoSWMM and SWMM 5
Normally, you get the same answer in InfoSWMM and the current version of SWMM 5 for the hydrology, RDII, dry weather flow and wet weather flow but be aware that the imported SWMM 5 model had a default of 8 iterations for the number of Picard iterations whereas the imported SWMM 5 model in InfoSWMM has as default of  4 iterations.  You need to change this to 8 iterations in the Run Manager dialog of InfoSWMM to get the same routing answers.

How to Copy from a SWMM 5 Table to Excel

Subject:  How to Copy from a SWMM 5 Table to Excel
Step 1. Highlight the rows you want to copy to Excel
Step 2:  Use the Copy to Clipboard or Copy to File command
Step 3:  Paste in Excel or open the exported text file

How to Copy from a SWMM 5 Table to Excel

by dickinsonre
Subject:  How to Copy from a SWMM 5 Table to Excel 
Step 1. Highlight the rows you want to copy to Excel 
Step 2:  Use the Copy to Clipboard or Copy to File command 
Step 3:  Paste in Excel or open the exported text file  

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Copy-and-pasting Culture

Copy and Pasted from the Dish

Copy-and-pasting Culture

Computer evolution
Maria Popova quotes from Mark Pagel's new bookWired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind: "Having culture means we are the only species that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors rather than from the genes they pass to us." Popova:
Language, says Pagel, was instrumental in enabling social learning — our ability to acquire evolutionarily beneficial new behaviors by watching and imitating others, which in turn accelerated our species on a trajectory of what anthropologists call "cumulative cultural evolution," a bustling of ideas successively building and improving on others. (How’s that for bio-anthropological evidence that everything is indeed a remix?)
Pagel elaborated in a recent Edge conversation:
We can all think of things that have made a difference in the history of life. The first hand axe, the first spear, the first bow and arrow, and so on. And we can ask ourselves, how many of us have had an idea that would have changed humanity? And I think most of us would say, well, that sets the bar rather high. I haven't had an idea that would change humanity. So let's lower the bar a little bit and say, how many of us have had an idea that maybe just influenced others around us, something that others would want to copy? And I think even then, very few of us can say there have been very many things we've invented that others would want to copy.
This says to us that social evolution may have sculpted us not to be innovators and creators as much as to be copiers, because this extremely efficient process that social learning allows us to do, of sifting among a range of alternatives, means that most of us can get by drawing on the inventions of others.

GitHub code and Markdown (MD) files Leveraging

 To better achieve your goal of leveraging your GitHub code and Markdown (MD) files for your WordPress blog or LinkedIn articles, consider t...