Land surface modeling informed by earth observation data: toward understanding blue–green–white water fluxes in High Mountain Asia

Mountains are important suppliers of freshwater to downstream areas, affecting large populations in particular in High Mountain Asia (HMA). Yet, the propagation of water from HMA headwaters to downstream areas is not fully understood, as interactions in the mountain water cycle between the cryo-, hydro- and biosphere remain elusive. We review...

Towards constraining soil and vegetation dynamics in land surface models: Modeling ASCAT backscatter incidence-angle dependence with a Deep Neural Network

A Deep Neural Network (DNN) is used to estimate the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) C-band microwave normalized backscatter (σ40o), slope (σ′) and curvature (σ″) over France. The Interactions between Soil, Biosphere and Atmosphere (ISBA) land surface model (LSM) is used to produce land surface variables (LSVs) that are input to the DNN. The DNN...

Perspective on satellite-based land data assimilation to estimate water cycle components in an era of advanced data availability and model sophistication

The beginning of the 21^st century is marked by a rapid growth of land surface satellite data and model sophistication. This offers new opportunities to estimate multiple components of the water cycle via satellite-based land data assimilation (DA) across multiple scales. By resolving more processes in land surface models and by...

Designing a shaped seat-pan cushion to improve postural (dis)comfort reducing pressure distribution and increasing contact area at the interface

Remaining seated for extended periods increases the risk health issues and discomfort perception. Consequently, the seat-pan design is crucial and could be mainly influenced by two factors: pressure distribution and seat contour. For seat pan discomfort, the lower average pressure is accompanied by less discomfort. Moreover, a seat contour...

From Radar to Reality.Associating persistent scatterers to corresponding objects

Multi-epoch Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) is widely used to estimate displacements of selected scatterers from phase observations. However, their interpretation needs a connection to objects in the real world. <br/><br/>To associate InSAR scatterers to their corresponding geo-objects, it is necessary to (i) accurately estimate...

Reliability Assessment of Light-Emitting Diode Packages with Both Luminous Flux Response Surface Model and Spectral Power Distribution Method

The inherent luminous characteristics and stability of LED packages during the operation period are highly dependent on their junction temperatures and driving currents. In this paper, the luminous flux of LED packages operated under a wide range of driving currents and junction temperatures are investigated to develop a luminous flux...

Point Cloud Based Visibility Analysis: first experimental results

Visibility computed from a LiDAR point cloud offers several advantages compared to using a gridded digital height-model. With a higher resolution and detailed information, point cloud data can provide precise analysis as well as an opportunity to avoid the process of generating a surface representation or a solid model. Also a better inclusion...

Impacts of problem scale and sampling strategy on surrogate model accuracy: An application of surrogate-based optimization in building design

Surrogate-based Optimization is a useful approach when the objective function is computationally expensive to evaluate, compared to Simulation-based Optimization. In the surrogate-based method, analytically tractable “surrogate models” (also known as “Response Surface Models — RSMs” or “metamodels”), are constructed and validated for each...

An axisymmetric non-hydrostatic model for double-diffusive water systems

The three-dimensional (3-D) modelling of water systems involving double-diffusive processes is challenging due to the large computation times required to solve the flow and transport of constituents. In systems that approach axisymmetry around a central location, computation times can be reduced by applying a quasi 3-D axisymmetric model setup....

Efficient and accurate PLIC-VOF techniques for numerical simulations of free surface water waves

In this paper the attention is focused on the effect of various VOF methods on efficient and accurate simulation of free surface water waves. For this purpose, we will compare several VOF methods in numerical simulations of propagating waves where strong nonlinear behavior is dominant in the flow. Comparisons and discussions will be provided to...

Active Shapes for Automatic 3D Modeling of Buildings

Recent technological developments help us to acquire high quality 3D measurements of our urban environment. However, these measurements, which come as point clouds or Digital Surface Models (DSM), do not directly give 3D geometrical models of buildings. In addition to that, they are not suitable for fast 3D rendering. Therefore, detection and 3D...

Wave Generation, Propagation and Absorption in CFD Simulations of Free Surface Flows

The PhD study focused on two topics. The first topic was energy dissipation in wave propagation. The wave dissipation can be caused by physical and/or numerical phenomena, such as the free surface treatment, physical viscosity and artificial viscosity due to discretization of the momentum equations. Among these the free surface treatment is an...

The minimum wind speed for sustainable turbulence in the nocturnal boundary layer

The collapse of turbulence in the nocturnal boundary layer is studied by means of a simple bulk model that describes the basic physical interactions in the surface energy balance. It is shown that for a given mechanical forcing, the amount of turbulent heat that can be transported downward is limited to a certain maximum. In the case of weak...