“Village Creek feeds into Lake Arlington,” Dr. Fang says. “In order to evaluate the water, we work closely with the city and the Trinity River Authority on storm-based monitoring to see how levels change in response to temperature, time, and weather conditions.”
In the North Texas area, where cities are prone to flash-flooding, understanding why flooding happens, when it will happen, and how to manage it when it does happen is crucial to ensuring a safe and abundant water supply.
“Often, North Texas is an area of climate extremes,” Fang says. “Being able to manage and protect from those extremes is crucial in planning, repairing, and adjusting existing infrastructure.”
For a different project, Fang, who has years of experience at Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters Center, is evaluating the flood risk of Tarrant County’s floodway levees and the hydrologic impact of land use/urbanization and infiltration on the Fort Worth floodway.
Through such studies, Fang and researchers like him are assisting city planners in addressing what-if scenarios before they become major problems.
“We’re helping the decision-makers make better decisions,” he says.
Saving Local Infrastructure
One of those decision-makers is the City of Arlington, which is facing a monumental choice in the near future. Old sewer lines throughout the city are nearing the end of their life expectancy and will soon start to crack and fail. It’s a pressing infrastructure concern for every region where such water management systems exist, but Arlington is hoping to address the issue before it becomes a problem. The difficulty lies in deciding which pipes to replace first and when to do it.
To that end, the city recently approved a $882,000 contract with UTA engineers to evaluate sewer pipes with a 60-inch or greater circumference.
Dr Ali Abolmaali
To mitigate costs, the University’s Center for Structural Engineering Research and Simulation is using a novel combination of robotic laser equipment and sonar to pinpoint trouble spots in pipelines in their 47-mile surveillance area. After evaluation, the team—led by Ali Abolmaali, chair of the Department of Civil Engineering—will recommend a new, more sustainable and resilient system of fiber-reinforced pipes for the future and help the city prioritize which pipes should be mended or replaced.
“We’ll make recommendations for what to do based on where the robots and sonar detect anomalies within the pipes,” Dr. Abolmaali explains. “This research could provide a blueprint for other cities to copy.”
While Arlington’s sewer system is relatively young compared to many throughout the country, the heavy rain the area received in 2015 had a significant impact on the infrastructure. Buzz Pishkur, Arlington’s water utilities director, says the city experienced significant wall erosion in some areas, including one that caused a collapse. By taking a look at the big picture now, before major problems erupt, Pishkur believes the citizens of Arlington will reap the benefits.
“This evaluation allows us to make more informed decisions about infrastructure replacement,” he says. “That could lead to fewer rate hikes and better use of our capital money. We can pinpoint where to spend the money at a lower cost to residents and with the least amount of inconvenience.”
Forecasting the Water Cycle
Like Abolmaali, Seo is also helping the decision-makers. But he’s doing it by traveling back in time via data and modeling.
“It’s called hindcasting,” he explains. “With it, we can go back 30 years and operate, as if in real-time, reservoirs and pipelines with and without the inflow forecast information.”
With this data, Seo can forecast information about precipitation, temperature, and inflow. Such data proves very valuable when water providers must pump water from one system into another. Turning on that pump requires extra energy and costs a lot of money. But with Seo’s help, the providers can make better decisions, which in turn saves energy while maintaining or improving lake levels.
Dr. DJ Seo
Seo’s research has yielded a $283,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office. With this funding, his team is developing an integrated decision support tool that utilizes the Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast Service, developed by the National Weather Service. That agency, the Tarrant Regional Water District, the Trinity River Authority, and the North Central Texas Council of Governments are collaborating on the project.
Currently, Seo is also using a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve the sustainability of large urban areas from extreme weather, urbanization, and climate change. One project under this umbrella is the development of an app that would allow users to report flood conditions in their areas. If the app works the way Seo anticipates, it’s possible the researchers will be able to aggregate thousands of flooding reports. With this crowd-sourced data, he and his team could model urban water systems at a very high resolution, which would enhance data-modeling and allow them to predict upcoming flooding with more lead-time and greater accuracy.
“It is important to recognize that rainfall climatology has been changing significantly,” Seo says. “We have to determine if existing infrastructure can deal with these and future changes that are expected to occur over time.”
But addressing local infrastructure issues has ramifications beyond the immediate area.
“The natural water cycle and the urban water cycle drive the movement of water in DFW, but they are all interconnected,” Seo explains. “The local is connected to the regional, the regional is connected to the continental, and the continental is connected to the global.”
It all leads back to the same idea: Continued—and hopefully improved—access to water for everyone.
“Our goal is pretty simple, ultimately,” says Fang. “If we can learn to manage and plan better, we can always enjoy the water.”
