Entries by Margot Dick

Anatomy of a Flood

February 10, 2021 in /by

“My vision is to restore the landscape’s natural flood resiliency,” says Larry Weber, “If we can strategically construct farm ponds, wetlands, terraces, and other conservation practices, they can slow the movement of water through the landscape. That will mitigate flood damage for both urban and rural Iowans.”

Distributed long-term hourly streamflow predictions using deep learning – A case study for State of Iowa

December 23, 2020 in /by

This study proposes a new deep recurrent neural network approach, Neural Runoff Model (NRM), which has been applied on 125 USGS streamflow gages in the State of Iowa for predicting the next 120 h due to the difficult nature of accurate streamflow forecasting. The proposed model outperforms the streamflow persistence, ridge regression and random forest […]

A serious gaming framework for decision support on hydrological hazards

December 23, 2020 in /by

In this study, a web-based decision support tool (DST) was developed for hydrological multi-hazard analysis while employing gamification techniques to introduce a competitive element. The serious gaming environment provides functionalities for intuitive management, visualization, and analysis of geospatial, hydrological, and economic data to help stakeholders in the decision-making process regarding hydrological hazard preparedness and response. […]

Hydrology@Home: a distributed volunteer computing framework for hydrological research and applications

December 23, 2020 in /by

Web-based distributed volunteer computing enables scientists to constitute platforms that can be used for computational tasks by using potentially millions of computers connected to the internet. The framework provides distribution and scaling capabilities for projects with user bases of thousands of volunteers. As a case study, we tested and evaluated the proposed framework with a […]

Crowdsourced approaches for stage measurements at ungauged locations using smartphones

December 23, 2020 in /by

Citizen science opportunities for environmental monitoring have increased with the advances in smart phone capabilities and their growing availability. This project describes a new method to accurately measure river levels using smartphone sensors. Pictures of the same point on the river’s surface are taken to perform calculations based on the GPS location and spatial orientation […]

A web-based decision support system for collaborative mitigation of multiple water-related hazards using serious gaming

December 23, 2020 in /by

The paper focuses on a participation-based serious gaming application developed to enhance multi-jurisdictional collaborative planning and decision making for mitigation of multiple hazards related to water, such as flooding, soil erosion, and water quality. The game is integrated into the Iowa Watershed Decision Support System (IoWaDSS).