The hydrological response of the Ourthe catchment to climate change as modelled by the HBV model

The Meuse is an important river in Western Europe, which is almost exclusively rain-fed. Projected changes in precipitation characteristics due to climate change, therefore, are expected to have a considerable effect on the hydrological regime of the river Meuse. We focus on an important tributary of the Meuse, the Ourthe, measuring about 1600 km2. The well-known hydrological model HBV is forced with three high-resolution (0.088°) regional climate scenarios, each based on one of three different IPCC CO2 emission scenarios: A1B, A2 and B1. To represent the current climate, a reference model run at the same resolution is used. Prior to running the hydrological model, the biases in the climate model output are investigated and corrected for. Different approaches to correct the distributed climate model output using single-site observations are compared. Correcting the spatially averaged temperature and precipitation is found to give the best results, but still large differences exist between observations and simulations. The bias corrected data are then used to force HBV. Results indicate a small increase in overall discharge, especially for the B1 scenario during the beginning of the 21st century. Towards the end of the century, all scenarios show a decrease in summer discharge, partially because of the diminished buffering effect by the snow pack, and an increased discharge in winter. It should be stressed, however, that we used results from only one GCM (the only one available at such a high resolution). It would be interesting to repeat the analysis with multiple model

Comparator hysteresis compensation for decision feedback equalisers

High-speed comparators are extensively used in serial link receiver designs. Some comparator architectures can show significant hysteresis that degrade the sensitivity of the receiver, increasing the bit error rate. In this Letter, a comparator hysteresis compensation strategy that re-uses the first tap of a decision feedback equaliser to shift the comparator input voltage, increasing the decision margin is proposed. An updated equaliser coefficient adaptation scheme is also introduced. The proposed technique can be used for binary and multi-level modulations

Mapping (dis)agreement in hydrologic projections

Hydrologic projections are of vital socio-economic importance. However, they are also prone to uncertainty. In order to establish a meaningful range of storylines to support water managers in decision making, we need to reveal the relevant sources of uncertainty. Here, we systematically and extensively investigate uncertainty in hydrologic projections for 605 basins throughout the contiguous US. We show that in the majority of the basins, the sign of change in average annual runoff and discharge timing for the period 2070–2100 compared to 1985–2008 differs among combinations of climate models, hydrologic models, and parameters. Mapping the results revealed that different sources of uncertainty dominate in different regions. Hydrologic model induced uncertainty in the sign of change in mean runoff was related to snow processes and aridity, whereas uncertainty in both mean runoff and discharge timing induced by the climate models was related to disagreement among the models regarding the change in precipitation. Overall, disagreement on the sign of change was more widespread for the mean runoff than for the discharge timing. The results demonstrate the need to define a wide range of quantitative hydrologic storylines, including parameter, hydrologic model, and climate model forcing uncertainty, to support water resource planning

Rainfall Generator for the Meuse Basin

A new methodology has been proposed to provide a better physical basis for the estimation of design discharges of the Dutch rivers. This new methodology is known as "rainfall generator". The hydrological part of the rainfall generator, a rainfall-runoff simulation in the Meuse basin, is described in this report. Therefore, ten generated records containing 3,000 year of precipitation and temperature data have been used as input for the HBV Meuse model. The main part of the actual work consists of the construction of a program which automatically executes the calculation sequenc

An up to 36Gbps analog baseband equalizer and demodulator for mm-wave wireless communication in 28nm CMOS

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Wind-driven ventilation improvement with plan typology alteration: a CFD case study of traditional Turkish architecture

Aligned with achieving the goal of net-zero buildings, the implementation of energy-saving techniques in minimizing energy demands is proving more vital than at any time. As practical and economic options, passive strategies in ventilation developed over thousands of years have shown great potential for the reduction of residential energy demands, which are often underestimated in modern building’s construction. In particular, as a cost-effective passive strategy, wind-driven ventilation via windows has huge potential in the enhancement of the indoor air quality (IAQ) of buildings while simultaneously reducing their cooling load. This study aims to investigate the functionality and applicability of a common historical Turkish architectural element called “Cumba” to improve the wind-driven ventilation in modern buildings. A case study building with an archetypal plan and parameters was defined as a result of a survey over 111 existing traditional samples across Turkey. Buildings with and without Cumba were compared in different scenarios by the development of a validated CFD microclimate model. The results of simulations clearly demonstrate that Cumba can enhance the room’s ventilation rate by more than two times while harvesting wind from different directions. It was also found that a flexible window opening strategy can help to increase the mean ventilation rate by 276%. Moreover, the room’s mean air velocity and ventilation rate could be adjusted to a broad range of values with the existence of Cumba. Thus, this study presents important findings about the importance of plan typology in the effectiveness of wind-driven ventilation strategies in modern dwellings

Characterizing wave- and current- induced bottom shear stress : U.S. middle Atlantic continental shelf

This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. The definitive version was published in Continental Shelf Research 52 (2013): 73-86, doi:10.1016/j.csr.2012.10.012.Waves and currents create bottom shear stress, a force at the seabed that influences sediment texture distribution, micro-topography, habitat, and anthropogenic use. This paper presents a methodology for assessing the magnitude, variability, and driving mechanisms of bottom stress and resultant sediment mobility on regional scales using numerical model output. The analysis was applied to the Middle Atlantic Bight (MAB), off the U.S. East Coast, and identified a tidally-dominated shallow region with relatively high stress southeast of Massachusetts over Nantucket Shoals, where sediment mobility thresholds are exceeded over 50% of the time; a coastal band extending offshore to about 30 m water depth dominated by waves, where mobility occurs more than 20% of the time; and a quiescent low stress region southeast of Long Island, approximately coincident with an area of fine-grained sediments called the “Mud Patch”. The regional high in stress and mobility over Nantucket Shoals supports the hypothesis that fine grain sediment winnowed away in this region maintains the Mud Patch to the southwest. The analysis identified waves as the driving mechanism for stress throughout most of the MAB, excluding Nantucket Shoals and sheltered coastal bays where tides dominate; however, the relative dominance of low-frequency events varied regionally, and increased southward toward Cape Hatteras. The correlation between wave stress and local wind stress was lowest in the central MAB, indicating a relatively high contribution of swell to bottom stress in this area, rather than locally generated waves. Accurate prediction of the wave energy spectrum was critical to produce good estimates of bottom shear stress, which was sensitive to energy in the long period waves.P.S. Dalyander was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Mendenhall Research Fellowship Program

State updating of a distributed hydrological model with Ensemble Kalman Filtering: Effects of updating frequency and observation network density on forecast accuracy

This paper presents a study on the optimal setup for discharge assimilation within a spatially distributed hydrological model. The Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is employed to update the grid-based distributed states of such an hourly spatially distributed version of the HBV-96 model. By using a physically based model for the routing, the time delay and attenuation are modelled more realistically. The discharge and states at a given time step are assumed to be dependent on the previous time step only (Markov property). <br><br> Synthetic and real world experiments are carried out for the Upper Ourthe (1600 km<sup>2</sup>), a relatively quickly responding catchment in the Belgian Ardennes. We assess the impact on the forecasted discharge of (1) various sets of the spatially distributed discharge gauges and (2) the filtering frequency. The results show that the hydrological forecast at the catchment outlet is improved by assimilating interior gauges. This augmentation of the observation vector improves the forecast more than increasing the updating frequency. In terms of the model states, the EnKF procedure is found to mainly change the pdfs of the two routing model storages, even when the uncertainty in the discharge simulations is smaller than the defined observation uncertainty

Multichannel 25 Gb/s low-power driver and transimpedance amplifier integrated circuits for 100 Gb/s optical links

Highly integrated electronic driver and receiver ICs with low-power consumption are essential for the development of cost-effective multichannel fiber-optic transceivers with small form factor. This paper presents the latest results of a two-channel 28 Gb/s driver array for optical duobinary modulation and a four-channel 25 Gb/s TIA array suited for both NRZ and optical duobinary detection. This paper demonstrated that 28 Gb/s duobinary signals can be efficiently generated on chip with a delay-and-add digital filter and that the driver power consumption can be significantly reduced by optimizing the drive impedance well above 50 Omega, without degrading the signal quality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the fastest modulator driver with on-chip duobinary encoding and precoding, consuming only 652 mW per channel at a differential output swing of 6 Vpp. The 4 x 25 Gb/s TIA shows a good sensitivity of - 10.3 dBm average optical input power at 25 Gb/s for PRBS 2(31) -1 and low power consumption of 77 mW per channel. Both ICs were developed in a 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS process