Hydrologic models are essential to watershed planning and management, particularly in the San Antonio River watershed where competition for scarce water resources is a challenge. As a result, the calibration and validation of hydrologic models are essential steps for their successful application. In this study, we examined the use of a loosely coupled genetic algorithm (GA) as an autocalibratio...

A clear understanding of a model is important for its appropriate use. In this article, eleven watershed scale hydrologic and nonpoint-source pollution models are reviewed: AGNPS, AnnAGNPS, ANSWERS, ANSWERS-Continuous, CASC2D, DWSM, HSPF, KINEROS, MIKE SHE, PRMS, and SWAT. AnnAGNPS, ANSWERS-Continuous, HSPF, and SWAT are continuous simulation models useful for analyzing long-term effects of hyd...

The public domain Integrated Hydrologic Model (IHM) combines the EPA surface water model HSPF and the USGS groundwater model MODFLOW with near simultaneous integration and fundamentally new interpretations of vadose zone process dynamics. The two model components are concurrently run, linked through an interface that provides a surfacewater to groundwater transition that maintains strict water ...

Old carpets may be reservoirs of dust, lead (Pb), and dust mite allergen. The purpose of this study was to determine if the dust, Pb, dust mite allergen, bacteria, and fungi on the surface of carpets could be reduced by 90% in 1 week with the use of a Hoover Self Propelled Vacuum with Embedded Dirt Finder (HSPF). A high-volume surface sampler (HVS3) was used to measure surface dust and pollutan...

This study evaluates the watershed-scale effects of non-point-source (NPS) pollution loads caused by rice straw mulching and no-tillage applications in upland crop areas using the Hydrological Simulation Program–Fortran (HSPF) model. The study area is the Byulmi-cheon watershed (1.21 km2) of South Korea. Hourly rainfall, discharge and stream water quality data were collected for three years (20...

The USEPA has estimated that over 20,000 water bodies within the United States do not meet water quality standards. One of the regulations in the Clean Water Act of 1972 requires states to monitor the total maximum daily load, or the amount of pollution that can be carried by a water body before it is determined to be "polluted," for any watershed in the United States (Copeland, 2005). In respo...

We consider how to learn Hierarchical Task Networks (HTNs) for planning problems in which both the quality of solution plans generated by the HTNs and the speed at which those plans are found is important. We describe an integration of HTN Learning with Reinforcement Learning to both learn methods by analyzing semantic annotations on tasks and to produce estimates of the expected values of the ...

This paper investigates the effect of land use and digital elevation models spatial resolution and scale on the simulation of stream flow in two coastal watersheds located in the Mississippi Gulf Coast (USA). Four elevation datasets were used: USGS DEM, NED, NASA’s SRTM and IFSAR (300, 30, 30, and 5 meter resolution, respectively). Three land use datasets were included in this study: USGS GIRAS...

To address the regional applicability of heat-source tower heat pumps (HSTHPs), a mathematical model HSTHPs was established and experimentally verified. In different thermal zones, seasonal operation characteristics were investigated in winter summer conditions. The results showed that, heating performance factor (HSPF) value cold zone is lowest, but it can reach 2.40 winter, HSPF values hot-su...