William A. Arnold

Initiation of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Observatory

There are well-known, substantial concerns that peoples uses of water may significantly alter the quantity and quality of water-cycle processes at the local and regional scales. Addressing these concerns requires a substantially better understanding of the linkages and feedback between the various systems than presently is available. Although many studies have examined human-water dynamics, the complexity of such coupled systems is not well understood as, among other causes, the data and tools for multidisciplinary natural scale studies are not available yet. The recent information and communication technology advancements, collectively labeled as informatics (or hydroinformatics for the water-related domain), enable to address a new class of problems around the organization of data and information leading to knowledge extraction. Hydroinformatics embraces not only methods of data capture, storage, processing, analysis and graphical display, but the use of advanced modeling, optimization, knowledge-based tools and computational infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure). This paper discusses the initiation of the cyberinfrastructure-based Upper Mississippi River Basin Observatory (UMRBO). The observatory would consist of a number of interdisciplinary, multi-institutional teams synergistically collaborating on a series of research sites at different locations within the basin. There is no existing recipe to establishing an observatory at this time, however, there is a vast amount of experience and knowledge that can be shared to help establish an observatory. Building an observatory should be a collaborative, inclusive and equitable process and could be used to establish a practical problem solving agenda linking the abundance of research carried out in the Upper Mississippi River Basin to the needs of mission agencies and stakeholders within the basin. In order to begin the process, a workshop was held, in which an international team of research scientists and practitioners came together to discuss how the process could become a reality.

Discovering Teleconnected Flow Anomalies: A Relationship Analysis of Dynamic Neighborhoods (RAD) Approach

Given a collection of sensors monitoring a flow network, the problem of discovering teleconnected flow anomalies aims to identify strongly connected pairs of events (e.g., introduction of a contaminant and its removal from a river). The ability to mine teleconnected flow anomalies is important for applications related to environmental science, video surveillance, and transportation systems. However, this problem is computationally hard because of the large number of time instants of measurement, sensors, and locations. This paper characterizes the computational structure in terms of three critical tasks, (1) detection of flow anomaly events, (2) identification of candidate pairs of events, and (3) evaluation of candidate pairs for possible teleconnection. The first task was addressed in our recent work. In this paper, we propose a RAD (Relationship Analysis of spatio-temporal Dynamic neighborhoods) approach for steps 2 and 3 to discover teleconnected flow anomalies. Computational overhead is brought down significantly by utilizing our proposed spatio-temporal dynamic neighborhood model as an index and a pruning strategy. We prove correctness and completeness for the proposed approaches. We also experimentally show the efficacy of our proposed methods using both synthetic and real datasets.

Wireless Technologies and Embedded Networked Sensing: Application to Integrated Urban Water Quality Management

The overall objective of our research is to establish a wireless network with embedded sensing capable of monitoring fundamental water quality parameters. The ability of these fundamental water quality parameters to be used for predicting the presence of emerging chemical contaminants in urban streams will also be determined. It is hypothesized that the water quality in streams draining similar impervious urban areas is controlled by the mean and variance of effective stormwater residence time. The mean and variance of water residence time, the time it takes urban runoff to travel between the impervious urban land and a receiving aquatic body, will be characterized by radio frequency identification technology (RFID), which will be augmented with the proposed wireless network. A small urban watershed will be equipped with wireless networked sensing to address the following objectives: (1) measurement of fundamental water quality and hydrologic parameters with spatially-dense and high frequency resolution, (2) correlation of general parameters with the presence and/or levels of emerging contaminants, and (3) integration of field measurements to the watershed using primarily the mean and variance of effective stormwater residence time. This approach will enable process-based scaling and forecasting of water quality in streams from the in-stream processes to the watershed level.