Journal of The American Water Resources Association最新文献

With the acceleration of urbanization, the sustainability of urban water infrastructure projects has become pivotal to social development. This research aims to construct a comprehensive sustainability assessment model for urban water public-private partnership (PPP) projects based on the environmental, social, and governance criteria. First, a multi-level assessment indicator system is established considering the economic, social, ecological, and governance sustainability dimensions. Then, the extended analytic hierarchy process is utilized to determine the weights of indicators based on expert scoring. To address the ambiguity of qualitative linguistic variables, the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy set method is applied to aggregate expert assessments. An empirical case study of an urban water project verifies the feasibility of the proposed approach. Results demonstrate that experts emphasize economic sustainability, while social sustainability is an overlooked dimension that requires improvement. The research contributes to the field by developing an applied, industry-specific sustainability evaluation model for urban water PPP projects using advanced decision-making techniques. This model provides practical tools for stakeholders to enhance the sustainable performance of urban water infrastructure projects.

Arizona has a long history of groundwater use, and there is concern about long term groundwater sustainability across the state. We explore groundwater trends across Arizona and how they vary with respect to: (1) whether groundwater pumping is regulated, and (2) relative access to local or imported surface water. Well observations from the Arizona Department of Water Resources are used to quantify water table depth trends and groundwater drilling patterns. There are more than 85,000 groundwater wells in Arizona, and new wells are routinely being drilled. The number of new shallow wells (<200 ft) has decreased over time in all parts of the state. But midrange (200–500 ft) to deep (>500 ft) wells have increased in the past 10 years in regulated and groundwater dominated areas. Most wells are small with low pumping capacities that fall below the regulatory limit; however, there are still large wells being drilled in unregulated areas. Results show statewide decreasing water storage and groundwater levels. Groundwater declines are less severe in the parts of the state that have groundwater regulation. However, looking closer at this trend, groundwater recovery is strongest in areas receiving imported Colorado River water which also implement managed groundwater recharge with the imported water. Our findings indicate that groundwater recovery is very localized and driven more by managed recharge from surface water as opposed to decreased groundwater pumping.

Restoration of urban rivers must simultaneously design for ecological habitat while accounting for altered flow regimes associated with urban runoff, flood protection, and industrial/wastewater discharge. The goal of this study was to use ecological flow targets to guide channel restoration of the Los Angeles (LA) River across potential future flow regimes. Using a one-dimensional hydraulic model, we simulated a range of channel cross section configurations subject to different flow management decisions (wastewater reuse, low-flow [LF] treatment, and baseflow augmentation). Hydraulic results were assessed relative to ecohydraulic targets for desirable aquatic species in the LA River (willow, steelhead trout, and Santa Ana sucker). Results suggest that, along the mainstem of the LA River, restoration designs that include narrow LF channels may support Santa Ana sucker habitat and steelhead migration if management decisions decrease instream flows (e.g., by reusing treated wastewater). However, the same channel design and management decisions may not provide conditions needed to propagate floodplain vegetation such as willows. In tributary reaches, flows are too low to support habitat conditions for Santa Ana sucker or steelhead but may be able to support riparian habitat if a soft-bottom LF channel and active floodplain are present. In general, results illustrate the trade-offs between water management goals and habitat requirements for target species.

The prevailing challenge centers on the limited application of single-purpose flood control reservoirs transitioning to multi-purpose reservoirs, which, despite their potential, often fall short in addressing the escalating demands for diverse water resource management. These challenges are compounded by outdated operational rules and changing environmental conditions. This research develops a framework to enhance the dual functionality of reservoirs, initially designed for flood control, to also support water supply through the determination of maximum safe water levels (MSWLs). Utilizing historical inflow data and reservoir simulation models, the study identifies opportunities for optimizing United States Army Corps of Engineers Louisville District reservoirs. It highlights certain reservoirs as ideal for augmenting water supply capabilities without compromising flood control performance. Others remain critical for flood management due to limited water supply potential, underscoring the importance of maintaining a focus on flood control. The findings illuminate the intricate balance required between managing flood risks and enhancing water supply, indicating that precise operational adjustments can significantly improve reservoir sustainability and efficiency. This method offers a viable pathway to convert single purpose reservoirs into multi-purpose reservoirs, meeting growing water demands while ensuring robust flood mitigation, and making a step toward better water utilization.

Coastal regions are becoming increasingly vulnerable to flooding. Due to growing risk, there is a need for a variety of accessible flood inundation services and information to improve resilience and adaptation outcomes. To better understand these needs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office for Coastal Management and the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services collaborated to host five virtual workshops during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand inundation needs and deficits of five professional sectors: coastal planning, transportation and navigation, realty and insurance, health and human services, and natural resource and floodplain managers. This paper outlines the information collected from these workshops, shares recommendations for future research to improve equitable coastal resilience and highlights the value of remote engagement for knowledge coproduction. From the project results, we share cross-cutting topics that emerged and propose a need for greater equity, inclusive engagement, interagency coordination and future research directions through scientist-stakeholder coproduction workshops for improved coastal resilience.

To improve the quality and success of compensatory mitigation under Clean Water Act Section 404, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency jointly promulgated regulations in 2008. These regulations promote the use of function assessments to determine appropriate compensatory mitigation to replace functions and services lost due to permitted impacts to aquatic resources and require a watershed approach to mitigation. The Oregon Removal-Fill law, administered by the Department of State Lands, has similar requirements. Despite higher level policy, there is a paucity of scientific focus at the practical level needed to improve the tools and practices required for regulatory program implementation to achieve better mitigation outcomes, contributing to an implementation gap. By describing key challenges and specific solutions, we share lessons from a 15-year interagency effort to develop and implement an integrated, function, and watershed-based stream compensatory mitigation program in Oregon. We highlight the importance of an intentional process of engagement and change management and identify outstanding science and policy needs to improve stream compensatory mitigation programs and field-scale outcomes.

Data-driven artificial intelligence (DDAI) prediction has gained much attention, especially in recent years, because of its power and flexibility compared to traditional approaches. In hydrology, streamflow forecasting is one of the areas that took advantage of utilizing DDAI-based forecasting, given the weakness of the old approaches (e.g., physical-based approaches). Since many different techniques and tools have been used for streamflow forecasting, there is a new way to explore them. This manuscript reviews the recent (2011–2023) applications of DDAI in streamflow prediction. It provides a background of DDAI-based techniques, including machine learning algorithms and methods for pre-processing the data and optimizing or enhancing the machine learning approaches. We also explore the applications of DDAI techniques in streamflow forecasting. Finally, the most common tools for utilizing DDAI techniques in streamflow forecasting are presented.

Seasonal regimes of stream temperatures are important for ecological health as well as for societal water use. Seasonal regimes can be captured in the annual temperature cycle (the mean temperature for each day of the year) or in summary statistics such as seasonal mean temperatures, the former of which is the focus of this work. The annual temperature cycle is often characterized as a sine function, which performs satisfactorily for most streams. However, the sine function is unable to capture major seasonal variations, particularly for colder, drier, and high-elevation regions. Seasonal summary statistics are effective for classification but do not capture the full time series, preventing the use of lost time-series information, and lack context for the comparison of trends, hindering distinction between different causes of similar seasonal trends. We propose an improved function called the “three-sine model” to describe the stream annual temperature cycle with higher accuracy and demonstrate its use in two case studies. The three-sine model uses a cosine function over the entire year coupled with two seasonal anomaly sine functions. The three-sine model captures the stream annual temperature cycle with eight parameters, reveals distinct spatial trends, and outperforms the sinusoidal model for all elevations and 99% of streams. We conclude that this approach can support improved stream temperature analysis by capturing detailed seasonal trends in context.

Large-scale hydrologic modeling is important for understanding changes in water resources and flood hazard across a broad range of climatic and hydrologic conditions. Parsimonious models, although simple, allow for an efficient way to model river systems across multiple decades to even centuries. Therefore, this study aims to assess the ability of the distributed Hillslope Link Model (HLM) TETIS to simulate streamflow observations across the contiguous United States (CONUS) from 1981 to 2020. To obtain model parameters across this domain, we partition the study area into 234 HydroSHEDS level 5 basins and calibrate the model to a single representative location near the outlet of each basin using dynamical dimension search for 100 realizations. Performance is then assessed at 5046 US Geological Survey streamgages with respect to the Kling Gupta Efficiency (KGE) and bias. Our simulations result in a median KGE of 0.43, with 89% of the sites having a value above the reference of 1 − √2 (~ -0.41). Furthermore, there is a dependence of the model performance on climate regions, with the model performing better in basins in cold and temperate regions than in arid ones. While the parameters are estimated based on daily precipitation inputs, it is shown that the model performs well even when forced with hourly precipitation, highlighting the robustness of the selected parameters to different inputs. Finally, the soil related parameters show dependence on soil properties, providing a basis for future model improvement. Overall, this study highlights the model's flexibility in performing across a vast domain with different runoff generation mechanisms.

The ordinary high water mark (OHWM) is a regulatory boundary essential to identifying the lateral jurisdictional limits of rivers and streams in the United States (U.S.). Bankfull is a scientific concept that has been defined and identified in a multitude of ways by scientists. Geomorphologist and hydrologist have long recognized that there can be variability in the identification of bankfull depending on how bankfull is defined. Furthermore, this variability is only increased by the inherent variability in stream characteristics that occurs along a reach of channel. Because of the overlap in the regulatory definition of OHWM and the scientific definitions of bankfull, one of the primary purposes of the study is to apply the definition of OHWM and compare it to bankfull in a variety of channel types in different climatic, hydrologic, and geologic settings. Our results show that there is a clear overlap between the identification of the OHWM and bankfull elevations. Regulatory practitioners are generally not specialized in fluvial geomorphology and yet are tasked with consistently and accurately identifying the OHWM in a variety of stream types throughout the U.S. Therefore, we also present how to apply a weight-of-evidence approach through a clear step-by-step process to potentially improve consistency and accuracy in identification of OHWM and bankfull by both scientists and non-scientists.