Michael Piasecki

• City College of New York

The historical water level fluctuations of the two neighboring Caribbean lakes of Azuei (LA) and Enriquillo (LE) on Hispaniola have shown random periods of synchronous and asynchronous behaviors, with both lakes exhibiting independent dynamics despite being exposed to the same climatic forces and being directly next to each other. This paper examin...

Lakes Azuei (LA) and Enriquillo (LE) on Hispaniola Island started expanding in 2005 and continued to do so until 2016. After inundating large swaths of arable land, submerging a small community, and threatening to swallow a significant trade route between the Dominican Republic and Haiti; worries persisted at how far this seemingly unstoppable expa...

This paper presents the development of an evenly spaced volume time series for Lakes Azuei and Enriquillo both located on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The time series is derived from an unevenly spaced Landsat imagery data set which is then exposed to several imputation methods to construct the gap filled uniformly-spaced time series so it c...

This article presents an improved algorithm for optimization and development of a digital bathymetric model (DBM) for Lake Azuei (LA) (Haiti) and Lake Enriquillo (LE) (Dominican Republic) using the ANUDEM method. Both sonar data and contour lines of the lakes’ layout extracted using Landsat imagery were compiled for bathymetry development. We show...

In situ monitoring remains the best path to acquire accurate high-frequency and long-term environmental data. However, current in situ environmental monitoring systems often overlook the crucially important inclusion of a comprehensive data management system as part of the installation package. Presently, streamlining commercially-available environ...

In this paper, we used Landsat imagery for water body identification to create a novel 36-year surface area extent time series for lakes Azuei (Haiti) and Enriquillo (Dominican Republic) aimed at illuminating the dramatic temporal changes of these two lakes not just at yearly but at monthly or even sub-monthly scales. We used the Normalized Differe...

The traditional software development model commonly named “waterfall” is unable to cope with the increasing functionality and complexity of modern embedded systems. In addition, it is unable to support the ability for businesses to quickly respond to new market opportunities due to changing requirements. As a response, the software development comm...

At the time of this special issue, we are faced with an unprecedented increase in the volume of hydrological data. More hydrological data are being collected today than ever before, at faster rates, creating a veritable data deluge. Fueling this deluge are new approaches to data collection, including improved devices such as cheaper and more effici...

While one objective of data management systems is to provide the units when annotating the collected data, another is that the units must be correctly manipulated during conversion steps. This is not a trivial task however and the units conversion time and errors for large datasets can be quite expensive. To date, more than a dozen Python modules h...

Unit representation in the Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS) specified in the IEEE 1451 standards is a binary sequence of 10 octets that encode the physical units as a product of the seven Système International base units, plus radian and steradian, each raised to a rational power in addition to an unsigned integer indicating the structure of...

This paper introduces a Graphical User Interface supported and platform-independent application to generate a Transducer Electronic Data Sheet (TEDS) based on the IEEE 1451.0 standard using Python programming language. Compared to other TEDS application development efforts, this application provides a help system that improves the usability as it r...

Global climate change manifests in the Caribbean basin as increased SSTs, precipitation anomalies, and changes in atmospheric moisture content, among other effects. These regional climate changes have a profound impact on the local human, flora, and fauna populations. Such is the case of the Enriquillo basin, a highly sensitive ecosystem located in...

Participatory engineering has been called for after major catastrophes, yet is often bypassed due to countervailing implementation of ?quick fixes?. While immediate expert-driven solutions may be attractive, in the long-term they may be ineffective and inconsistent with the goals and capacities of local stakeholders. This article discusses the find...

Hydrometeorological data is exiguous in developing countries due to the exorbitant price of actual weather monitoring systems, data acquisition and communication infrastructure produced mostly in developed countries. Another impediment to large scale data collection in developing countries is the lack of or presence of limited local resources both...

A high resolution model mesh was required to numerically simulate sediment transport in tidal marshes. The timing of flooding is dependent on the tidal marsh ground elevation, which requires accurate topographic elevation data. The tidal prism of the marsh is determined by the volume provided by tidal channels in the system. Hence, their location a...

In 2005 a prototype Observatory Information System (OIS) was developed for the Illinois River Basin Observatory (IRBO), connected to a federated scientific data network, populated with a representative collection of legacy datasets, and linked to external data streams. The perspective of seven years' time and the disestablishment of the system prov...

In this paper we present a controlled vocabulary service application (CVSA) that we primarily developed in semantic support for the Environmental Data Store (EDS), but also as an access point for other controlled vocabularies that are commonly used in the environmental field. We use a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) implementation for t...

Background Though the benefits of centralized water systems (e.g. improved publichealth, environmental protection, streamlined operations, economy of scale, reliability) are well known, these systems are not always feasible or appropriate. In developing world settings there has been growing interest by infrastructure experts,researchers, and intern...

This paper describes the development of a database and a website to support the newest version of Low Impact Development Rapid Assessment (LIDRA) model, LIDRA 2.0, a planning level model for assessing the cost-effectiveness of low impact development (LID) and addressing runoff-related problems in urban watersheds. LIDRA 2.0 is a web-based applicati...

The Haitian government passed a law in 2009 to decentralize water utility management and improve cost recovery. This study identifies the attitudes of the public towards payment for and management of water and sanitation, several months after the 2010 earthquake, through a survey (N = 171) and semi-structured interviews (N = 19) in Leogane, Haiti....

This study investigates differences in men’s and women’s access to water and sanitation in Leogane, Haiti (population ~300,000), a town situated at the epicenter of the January 2010 earthquake. While research suggests that women’s water and sanitation access is crucial to health, security, and equity in post-disaster situations, there are a number...

This study investigates differences in men’s and women’s access to water and sanitation in Leogane, Haiti (population ~300,000), a town situated at the epicenter of the January 2010 earthquake. While research suggests that women’s water and sanitation access is crucial to health, security, and equity in post-disaster situations, there are a number...

In this paper we focus on the development of a model grid for a numerical approach to study sediment transport processes in Delaware Bay marshes. Marshes feature a high degree of spatial variability on very small spatial scales. Integration of tidal channels with widths of only a few meters is required to provide enough volume for the tidal prism....

The ecological value of tidal marsh systems for the environment and their adjacent water body is increasingly recognized. Natural and anthropogenic changes in the environment represent challenges to the development and sustainability of marsh systems that can lead to degradation and losses when negative impacts accumulate. Physical, chemical, and b...

Numerical modeling in the water sciences has been shifting from developing single or specific purpose-oriented tightly intertwined model applications to integrated model systems addressing more complex and interlinked geo-physical, -chemical and -biological processes across all strata of the critical zone geo-volume. This is a response to a number...

As scientists gain experience with using modern informatics to access and to share data, some limitations in the metadata descriptions of the spatial and environmental context of these observations are becoming apparent that were not immediately obvious. For hydrologists, the archetype for sampling stations is the gage on the river. Simply plotting...

With the increasing use of internet infrastructure the hydrologic modeling community is seeking to adopt new paradigms for their modeling needs. One such paradigm is the use of a Community Modeling System where the community can funnel their efforts to create widely accepted modeling approaches, share the data needed, and also exchange their result...

Nomenclatures of hydrologic parameters are large and very fragmented. One of the key goals of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System project (his.cuahsi.org) is to unify semantically diverse hydrologic observations and organize them so the data can be easily discovered, accessed and analyzed in different types of research scenarios, by different...

Hydrologic communities around the world have developed a plethora of codes in a multitude of programming languages over the past few decades in order to assess environmental processes and to predict changes in the hydrologic realm. While these codes represent a vast amount of knowledge, expertise and resources spent and also have been extremely use...

An ontology was developed to enable a single-dimensional keyword search of time-series data collected at fixed points, such as stream gage records, water quality observations, or repeated biological measurements collected at fixed stations. The hierarchical levels were developed to allow navigation from general concepts to more specific ones, termi...

The 2D hydrodynamic numerical (HN) model Marina is introduced to simulate physical processes in the Delaware Bay. It was chosen because it is embedded in a complete development environment from pre- to post processing, and it includes a wave and sediment module, which will be necessary for future research. NOAA's Model Evaluation Environment (MEE)...

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) project is developing CyberInfrastructure (CI), and services to support the advance of hydrologic science in the United States. CUAHSI HIS developed CI supports storage of water observations data in a relational database, p...

The Mid-Atlantic region in the United States (US) is composed of a diverse range of gradients across its natural and human systems. These gradients encompass heavily urbanized population centers, agri- culture dominated valleys, reforested headwaters, and some of the most important estuaries in North America. The Mid-Atlantic Watershed Atlas (MAWA)...

This paper describes the ongoing development of Low-Impact-Development Rapid Assessment Model (LIDRA), a planning level model for assessing the cost-effectiveness of low impact development (LID) as a means of reducing runoff and runoff-related problems in urban watersheds. The newest version, LIDRA 2.0 is an open-source web-based application. LIDRA...

Supply of adequate keywords in data searches is a key element to building search clients. This is particularly true for science or engineering areas that straddle many subjects such as the hydrology field. The main difficulties that arise when trying to search across many disparate data holdings is that there are no norms that describe data sets un...

This is an invited contribution. Hydrologic communities around the world have developed a plethora of codes in a multitude of programming languages over the past few decades in order to assess environmental processes and to predict changes in the hydrologic realm. While these codes represent a vast amount of knowledge, expertise and resources spent...

The Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) is a prototypical observatory funded by the 2005 NSF program on ``Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories: Prototype Systems to Address Cross-Cutting Needs (CEO:P).'' For the past three years, our multi-institutional team of estuary and hydrologic scientists, environmental engineers, c...

In recent years the use of workflow engines for carrying out modeling and data analyses tasks has gained increased attention in the science and engineering communities. Tasks like processing raw data coming from sensors and passing these raw data streams to filters for QA/QC procedures possibly require multiple and complicated steps that need to be...

The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) is an internet based system to support the sharing of hydrologic data consisting of databases connected using the internet through web services as well as software for data discovery, access and publication. The HIS is founded upon an information model for observations at stationary points that support...

Semantic annotations are playing an increasingly important role in the world of metadata, more specifically when dealing with semantic heterogeneities between information systems. The need to bring together disparate data sources (in terms of syntax and semantics) so they can be searched simultaneously from a single search environment has become on...

Over the next decade, it is likely that science and engineering research will produce more scientific data than has been created over the whole of human history. The successful use of these data to achieve new scientific breakthroughs will depend on the ability to access, integrate, and analyze these large datasets. Robust data organization and pub...

Considering the scope of water resources research, data can be available from many different sources that use different nomenclature, storage technologies, interfaces and even languages, which make its discovery a hard and time-consuming task. This paper addresses the development of an ontology-aided, clustered search mechanism that enables queryin...

Data repositories such as the USGS' National Water Information System (NWIS), EPA's Storage and Retrieval System (EPA STORET) offer a considerable volume of data for researchers and engineers in the United States through their websites. While accessible through a web browser, data from these sources can not be directly ingested by modeling or analy...

Ontologies are increasingly emerging as a tool for bridging semantic heterogeneities, a problem that is prevalent in scientific data sets particularly across domains. The problem of semantic or descriptive heterogeneity is the result of historically independent annotation efforts by those that have collected or acted as steward for collected data r...

This paper aims to present the development of an integrated hydrological model which involves functionalities of digital watershed processing, online data retrieval, hydrologic simulation and post-event analysis. The proposed system is intended to work as a back end to the CUAHSI HIS cyberinfrastructure developments. As a first step into developing...

The inadequacies of water cycle observations for monitoring long-term changes in the global water system, as well as their feedback into the climate system, poses a major constraint on sustainable development of water resources and improvement of water management practices. Hence, The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has established Task WA-08-01,...

Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) is an NSF-supported project focused on studying hypoxia in Chesapeake Bay using advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) technologies. The project is organized around four concurrent and interacting activities: 1) CBEO:S provides science and management context for the use of CI technologies, focusing on hypo...

The objective of this study is the preparation and indexing of rainfall data products for ingestion into the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) node of the CUAHSI/WATERs network. Rainfall products (which are obtained and then processed based on the WSR-88D NEXRAD network) are obtained from the NOAA/NWS Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Se...

A semantic web ontology enables semantic data integration and semantic smart searching. Several organizations have attempted to implement smart registration and integration or searching using ontologies. These are the NOESIS (NSF project: LEAD) and HydroSeek (NSF project: CUAHS HIS) data discovery engines and the NSF project GEON. All three applica...

The need for a unified and improved data access system for the nation’s vast hydrologic data holdings has increased over the past few years as researchers strive for better understanding the human impact on the nation’s water cycle. Large mission oriented data repositories such as the USGS’ National Water Information System (NWIS) and EPA’s Storage...

A prototype system for a Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) is under development by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the domains of environmental engineering, marine science, hydrology, ecology, and computer science. The vision is to provide new means of coupling and synthesizing field sampled and model generated data in a...

A three-dimensional numerical model for the tidal portion of the Delaware Bay has been developed and used to simulate wet season conditions of Spring 2003. The model domain extends from Trenton, NJ south past the inlet at Cape May, NJ and incorporates a large portion of the continental shelf. A variable, harmonically decomposed, water level boundar...

Hydrodynamic models generally deal with large sets of data and utilize substantial computational resources. Powerful, robust servers with extensive storage capabilities are desirable for rapid execution. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to effort those kinds of facilities whereas a centralized computer system together with a user access int...

Semantic heterogeneity is a common problem when trying to unify information from disparate data systems. In order to overcome these heterogeneities it is generally understood that no one system or convention is the best, rather that mechanisms need to be implemented in which researchers can both agree on terms or keywords used and also the establis...

A prototype system for a Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory �CBEO� is under development by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the domains of environmental engineering, marine science, hydrology, ecology, and computer science. The vision is to provide new means of coupling and synthesizing field sampled and model generated data in a...

Search engines have changed the way we see the Internet. The ability to find the information by just typing in keywords was a big contribution to the overall web experience. While the conventional search engine methodology worked well for textual documents, locating scientific data remains a problem since they are stored in databases not readily ac...

Physically-based fully-distributed hydrologic models simulate hydrologic state variables spatiotemporally using information on forcing (climate) and landscape (topography, land use, hydrogeology) heterogeneities. Incorporating physical data layers in the hydrologic model requires intensive data development. Traditionally, GIS has been used for data...

Success in data discovery relies on the quality of metadata. Information systems design and user's willingness are two important factors determining completeness and correctness of metadata. Controlled vocabularies are very useful for annotating data with relevant information however they do not always guarantee homogeneity. For example in EPA STOR...

The proposed project will demonstrate the applicability and utility of some CyberInfrastructure components currently being developed by the Hydrologic Information System (HIS) group of CUAHSI for use by both the CLEANER and CUAHSI communities. Because of the complexity of the system components it is impossible to produce a roll-out product that wou...

A new project is underway to develop and deploy a Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO), which is intended to serve as a prototype of cyberinfrastructure (CI) for environmental observatory networks (EONs) that will demonstrate the transformative power of CI. The CBEO will be developed by a team of highly qualified computer scientists, eco...

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) has a Hydrologic Information System (HIS) project, which is supported by NSF to develop infrastructure and services to support the advance of hydrologic science in the United States. This paper provides an overview of the HIS project. A set of web services called...

A numerical D model for the tidal portion of the Delaware Bay has been developed using the UnTRIM hydrodynamic kernel. The model extends from Trenton, NJ south past the inlet at Cape May, NJ and incorporates a large portion of the continental shelf (up to the 50 meter isobath) to capture the processes of the continental shelf and their relation and...

In this paper, various turbulence closure models are compared for use with a hydrodynamic 3D code in the Delaware Bay. More specifically, six (6) different turbulence closures, i.e. a constant eddy viscosity, an algebraic model, and 4 two-equation closure models have been used for comparison. These models have been implemented in the UnTRIM hydrody...

Metadata is needed to facilitate data sharing among geospatial information communities. Geographic Metadata Standards are available but tend to be general and complex in nature and also are not well suited to overcome semantic heterogeneities across vocabularies of different domains and user communities. Current formalizations of metadata standards...

Sharing of data sets between numerical models is considered an important and pressing issue in the modeling community, because of (i) the time consumed to convert data sets and (ii) the need to connect different types of numerical codes to better map inter-connectedness of aquatic domains. One of the reasons for the data sharing problem arises from...

The recent emergence of a number of Environmental Observing systems calls the for the need of a nationwide geoscience cyberinfrastructure. One of the problems that need to be overcome when building a nationwide CI is the vexing problem of disparate and incompatible metadata descriptions that exist due to the use of different standards (if at all) a...

Virtual Observatories [VO's] hold the promise of providing streamlined access to disparate, heterogeneous data concerning a particular area of study, enabling researchers, educators, decision makers and the public to find and use more of the information they need. In the context of the study of a river basin, the task of building a VO requires the...

A Hydrologic Information and Observing System (HIOS) is being designed and developed by a group of academic hydrologists and the San Diego SuperComputer Center. This is part of a research program supported by the National Science Foundation through the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI). HIOS componen...

The Hydrologic Information System (HIS), of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc., (CUAHSI), has as one of its goals to improve access to large volume, high quality, and heterogeneous hydrologic data sets. This will be attained in part by adopting a community metadata profile to achieve consistent description...

A long-term hydrologic observatory is proposed for an area encompassing the Potomac River Basin and the basins that form the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay from the Gunpowder River on the north to the Rappahannock River on the south. The area is approximately 52,000 sq km and spans five physiographic provinces, with total relief of about 1200...

Common Metadata standards typically lack of domain specific elements, have limited extensibility and do not always resolve semantic heterogeneities that could occur in the annotations. To facilitate the use and extension of metadata specifications a methodology called Dynamic Community Profiles, DCP, is presented. The methodology allows to overwrit...

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc, (CUAHSI) is developing a Hydrologic Information System (HIS)to advance hydrologic science and education in US academic institutions. A central mission of this system is to support CUAHSI's parallel Hydrologic Observatory and Hydrologic Synthesis Center projects. The HIS...

This paper presents the development of an efficient strategy for achieving in-stream dissolved oxygen (DO) water quality standards (WQSs) via optimized point-load control strategies using the adjoint method. To this end, a least-squares-type objective function is formulated that measures the difference between desired (WQSs) and current DO concentr...

A method is presented to compute sensitivities of in-stream dissolved oxygen (DO) with respect to perturbations in the load vector and the reaction coefficients that make up the eutrophication cycle. It is shown that the direct sensitivity method, i.e., the repetitive solution of the direct problem, produces the desired information, however at a la...

This paper describes the various steps to develop a web-based information system for now- and forecast oceanographic and meteorological data products. An initial user survey delineates the user needs and requirements and determines to what extent and level the web-system would need to be developed. In order to have a globally re- locatable system i...

The development of a high resolution unstructured orthogonal grid using a program package called JANET for the Delaware Bay estuary was discussed. It was suggested that a second order accuracy in spatial discretization can be achieved when the polygon centers are equally distant from the shared side. JANET was found to generate high quality grids....

Recent developments and discussions on nationwide scales increasingly stress the need for semantic interoperability among communities due to the lack of specific domain descriptions of the data being processed. These shortcomings are largely based on the fact that each community typically only focuses on its specific needs with little or no attenti...

Despite recent advances to present simulation results as 3D graphs or animation contours, the modeling user community still faces some shortcomings when trying to move around and analyze data. Typical problems include the lack of common platforms with standard vocabulary to exchange simulation results from different numerical models, insufficient d...

A method is presented to compute sensitivities of instream dissolved oxygen (DO) with respect to carbonaceous biological oxygen demand (CBOD) loadings in a well-mixed stream. The utilization of the adjoint methodology proves to be an extremely efficient way to compute these sensitivities. The sensitivities are coupled with a gradient-based search a...

This paper presents a conceptual development of a markup language that is specific to the hydrologic community. The predicted vast increase in data volume as well as the heterogeneity of the data used across the many disciplines in hydrology, have mandated the development of a standardized description of data in order to facilitate storage, queryin...

This poster presents the conceptual development of a Hydrologic Ontology for the Web (HOW) that will facilitate data sharing among the hydrologic community. Hydrologic data is difficult to share because of its predicted vast increase in data volume, the availability of new measurement technologies and the heterogeneity of information systems used t...

A method is presented to compute sensitivities of in-stream dissolved oxygen (DO) with respect to carbonaceous biological oxygen demand (CBOD) loadings in a well-mixed stream. The utilization of the Adjoint Methodology proves to be an extremely efficient way to compute these sensitivities as compared to using a repetitive solution of the forward fa...

The diversion of fresh water from estuaries for agricultural and municipal uses leads to an upstream shift in the brackish water zone that can disrupt ecosystems and deteriorate water quality at downstream points. Models are routinely used to predict hydrodynamic and water quality conditions in estuaries, and presented here is a modeling approach t...

Metadata are the bibliographical and technical documentation of data and other online resources. A selection of metadata elements according to the ISO 19115 is used to define a manageable core metadata set for the coastal zone. Web applications of resource discovery and web mapping are presented which rely entirely on standardized meta information....

A method is presented to optimize diversions of freshwater from multiple points in a well-mixed estuary. The objective is to prevent salinity concentrations at a point in the brackish water zone from exceeding levels that are stipulated for environmental defense. Optimization is achieved using an efficient gradient-based search algorithm (quasi-New...

Web portals are state-of-the-art dissemination centers of data and processed information in many areas of economic and scientific applications. Successful matching of the supply and demand of scientific data relies on the quality of metadata describing available data sets from providers, reports or background information from archives, and scientif...

Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) developments for the nations impaired streams have become a major focus of activity over the past few years. This concept encompasses the determination of the Load Capacity (LC) of a stream and the associated Waste Load Allocation (WLA) for point and Load Allocation (LA) for non-point source pollutants. Even though g...

Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) developments for the nations impaired streams have become a major focus of activity over the past few years. This concept encompasses the determination of the Load Capacity (LC) of a stream and the associated Waste Load Allocation (WLA) for point and Load Allocation (LA) for non-point source pollutants. Even though g...

Abstract Almost 25 years after the passing of the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has introduced the concept of Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL). This concept encompasses the determination of the Load Capacity (LC) of a stream and the associated Waste Load Allocation (WLA) for point and Load Allocation (LA) for non-p...

This paper presents a new and efficient method to control the upstream migration of saltwater in well mixed estuaries. The underlying goal is to prevent adverse effects on salinity-sensitive biota and to simultaneously allow for maximum freshwater diversions. The conflicting objectives are formulated as an optimization problem where control is achi...

A numerical technique is presented for identification of spatially distributed dispersion coefficients for 2D mass transport in vertically mixed rivers and estuaries. The method is based on a nonlinear optimization procedure that minimizes the squared error between observed and computed concentration values. Gradient information is efficiently comp...

The discretized method of characteristics was used to develop a new numerical model for the analysis of the wave processes in the hydraulic ram. The model encompasses all parts of the device including, for the first time, the air chamber and the delivery pipe. This in turn allows a comprehensive study of the unsteady flows in the unit as the air ch...