2008 Seminar Series

The Departmental Seminar Series is held on Thursdays at 11.05am in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Common Room - Room C301, Block C, Engineering. (map). Staff, students and visitors are all very welcome to attend.

Staff, Graduate Student and Visitor presentations cover a wide range of subjects related to Civil and Environmental Engineering issues, and contribute immensely to ground-breaking research. PhD students present their final-year 45 minute talks as part of this series, to outline their research projects and present their findings to their peers and to those attending from outside the Department.

All presentations are followed by light refreshments in the Departmental Common Room to encourage further discussion -- bring your coffee-cup.

Please contact Dr Justin Costelloe for any queries or if you wish to make a presentation.

Upcoming Seminars
Previous Seminars

Upcoming Seminars
Date	Presenter	Topic
Feb 12th	Professor Venkat Lakshmi (University of South Carolina, USA)	Special Presentation: 'The role of the water cycle and the importance of land surface hydrological models in weather and climate studies'
Feb 14th	Jurgen Schaeffer	Final PhD presentation: 'Scaling Point Based Aquifer Data for Developing Regional Groundwater Models: Application to the Gippsland Groundwater System'
Feb 22nd	Dr Olivier Merlin	Special presentation:' 'Multi-domain remote sensing of soil moisture for hydrological applications'
Previous Seminars
Date	Presenter	Topic	Podcast
Feb 6th	Matthew Berrisford	Final PhD presentation: 'Predicting and Storing Unutilised Irrigation Orders for Environmental Benefit'
Feb 5th	Prof Geoffery Pegram	Special presentation: 'Hourly estimation of Spatial Potential Evapotranspiration over Southern Africa and Empirical Mode Decomposition on the Sphere: applications to Global Temperature Data'
Jan 31st	Zubair Syed	Final PhD presentation: 'Damage assessment of concrete elements under blast loading'

Abstracts

Seminars
Date		Topic

Jan 31st	Zubair Syed	'Damage assessment of concrete elements under blast loading' Pressure-Impulse (P-I) diagrams based on SDOF models of concrete elements are widely used for structural damage assessment in protective technology. This project investigates the suitability and applicability of simplified SDOF models and P-I diagrams for damage assessment of concrete elements under blast loading. The effect of blast negative phase on P-I diagram has also been investigated. Based on the thorough study, modified method for obtaining P-I diagrams has been proposed. Detailed Finite Element (FE) analysis of reinforced concrete beams and panels under explosive loading has been carried out to investigate the failure mode and damage of concrete. In FE analysis, both Total strain based model and Smeared crack-Plasticity model with Drucker-Prager failure criteria has been used. Based on the results of detailed analysis, a reliable simplified damage assessment method has been proposed for blast damage assessment of concrete elements.
Feb 6th	Matthew Berrisford	This research used Multiple Linear Regression analysis to investigate the causes of both unseasonal flooding of the Barmah-Millewa Forest and unutilised irrigation orders in the Murray Irrigation System. Finding that rainfall is a contributing factor to unutilised irrigation orders. Unutilised irrigation orders were found to contribute to some unseasonal flooding events of the Barmah-Millewa Forest, though they were not the most important factor. The research then investigates a number of methods of predicting both advanced irrigation orders and unutilised irrigation orders using an updated version of Options Analysis in Irrigation Systems (OASIS). The best performing method was then used to test three different storage options. The three options were storage in on farm storages and two locations for an en-route storage. No discernable difference was found between the three options.
Feb 12th	Professor Venkat Lakshmi (University of South Carolina, USA)	Land surface hydrology is a collection of complex processes. Precipitation is partitioned into infiltration and runoff depending on antecedent soil moisture conditions, the properties of the soil and its abilities to conduct water away from the surface, the slope of the land surface and the amount of atmospheric demand for evapotranspiration. The observed solar radiation and the computed downward longwave radiation drive the energy budget and evapotranspiration. However in reality the spatial variability both the land surface properties (soil and vegetation) as well as the meteorological inputs (precipitation and radiation) are never accurately known. This incurs errors in the computer simulations of water and energy budgets. Satellite remote sensing has a broad spatial view of the land surface and is able to average the heterogeneities and provide data for use in hydrology such as soil moisture, surface temperature and vegetation density. In the first part of my talk, I will use a hydrological model to study the simulations of the vertical profile of the land surface soil moisture and the surface temperature on a 1/8 degree grid in the Upper Mississippi River Basin over a period of 50 years from 1950-1999 on a daily time step. Vegetation information comes from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument. The hydrological balance is checked with the observed stream flows at the various gauging stations, soil moisture observations and the distributed model response of surface temperature is compared to the surface temperature derived from the TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS). In the second part I will talk about the influence of the water cycle and land-atmosphere interactions on variability of the North American Monsoon System (NAMS) is investigated using the TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) pathfinder, Climate Predict Center (CPC) gauge precipitation, and observed and NCEP/NCAR reanalysis Snow Water Equivalent (SWE). Three hypotheses are tested that establish the connection between land surface variables and precipitation in the NAMS region.
Feb 14th	Jurgen Schaeffer	'Scaling Point Based Aquifer Data for Developing Regional Groundwater Models: Application to the Gippsland Groundwater System' Difficulties associated with developing regional groundwater models include the accurate representation of point based field measurements in scales suitable for modelling purposes. Much of the hydraulic conductivity data required for groundwater model input may not be available, or only available in localised regions. These data need to be scaled to reflect the regional values. This thesis demonstrates that it is possible to generate hydraulic conductivity data suitable for input into regional groundwater models from lithological data and measured or inferred hydraulic conductivity.
Feb 22nd	Dr Olivier Merlin	The retrieval of surface soil moisture from remote sensing is optimal in the microwave domain. However, the spatial resolution of satellite-based microwave radiometers (about 40km) is too coarse to be integrated directly into hydrological models. In this context, a disaggregation technique is developed to improve the resolution of microwave-derived soil moisture. The approach is to estimate soil evaporative fraction in the optical domain at higher resolution (1km), and express fine-scale surface soil moisture as function of the coarse-scale microwave-derived soil moisture plus corrective terms function of fine-scale soil evaporative fraction. The method is validated with the airborne data from the National Airborne Field Experiment 2006 (NAFE'06) with an overall root mean square difference between downscaled and observed soil moisture of less than 2% vol. An example of disaggregation/assimilation coupling scheme is finally given to illustrate the impact of the disaggregation on model predictions in terms of soil moisture and surface fluxes.