Environment

Accurate runoff forecasting is crucial for reservoir operators as it allows optimized water management, flood control and hydropower generation. Land surface models in mountainous regions depend on climatic inputs such as precipitation, temperature and solar radiation to model the water and energy dynamics and produce runoff as output. With the rapid development of cheap electronics applied in various systems, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), satellite and airborne technologies, the prospect of practically measuring spatial Snow Water Equivalent in a dense temporal scale is...

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) will revolutionize the way we travel; however, what impact this revolution will have on advancing broader societal goals is uncertain. To date, the private sector technology rollout has emphasized the automation side of CAVs and neglected the potentially transformative possibilities brought by a more collaborative notion of connectivity. This may have significant downsides from a broader societal perspective. For example, CAVs (including those on the road today) collect a vast amount of data gathered through onboard systems (e.g., radar, lidar,...

Halting climate change will require a concerted effort to reduce emissions from on-road vehicles. While significant progress has been made to improve vehicle efficiency and reduce CO 2 emissions, surface transportation accounted for half the increase in US green-house gas (GHG) emissions over the past two decades. Today, surface transportation accounts for 24 percent of all US emissions. Automobile improvements alone will not be sufficient to meet federal and state emissions targets; policy makers also need to identify solutions that reduce the demand for car travel. Information technology...

Integrated management of food–energy–water systems (FEWS) requires a unified, flexible and reproducible approach to incorporate the interdependence between sectors, and include the risk of non-stationary environmental variations due to climate change. Most of the recently developed methods in the literature fall short of one or more aspects in such integration. In this article, we propose a novel approach based upon fundamentals of decision theory and reinforcement learning that (1) quantifies and propagates uncertainty, (2) incorporates resource interdependence, (3) includes the impact of...