title = "Drinking Water Infrastructure Assessment with
Teleconnection Signals, Satellite Data Fusion and
Mining",
school = "Civil Engineering, University of Central Florida",
year = "2015",
address = "USA",
keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming, grammatical
evolution, Water quality, water quantity, remote
sensing, data fusion, nowcasting, forecasting, lake
mead",
abstract = "Adjustment of the drinking water treatment process as
a simultaneous response to climate variations and water
quality impact has been a grand challenge in water
resource management in recent years. This desired and
preferred capability depends on timely and quantitative
knowledge to monitor the quality and availability of
water. This issue is of great importance for the
largest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead,
which is located in the proximity of a big metropolitan
region - Las Vegas, Nevada. The water quality in Lake
Mead is impaired by forest fires, soil erosion, and
land use changes in nearby watersheds and waste water
effluents from the Las Vegas Wash. In addition, more
than a decade of drought has caused a sharp drop by
about 100 feet in the elevation of Lake Mead. These
hydrological processes in the drought event led to the
increased concentration of total organic carbon (TOC)
and total suspended solids (TSS) in the lake. TOC in
surface water is known as a precursor of disinfection
by-products in drinking water, and high TSS
concentration in source water is a threat leading to
possible clogging in the water treatment process. Since
Lake Mead is a principal source of drinking water for
over 25 million people, high concentrations of TOC and
TSS may have a potential health impact. Therefore, it
is crucial to develop an early warning system which is
able to support rapid forecasting of water quality and
availability. In this study, the creation of the
nowcasting water quality model with satellite remote
sensing technologies lays down the foundation for
monitoring TSS and TOC, on a near real-time basis. Yet
the novelty of this study lies in the development of a
forecasting model to predict TOC and TSS values with
the aid of remote sensing technologies on a daily
basis. The forecasting process is aided by an iterative
scheme via updating the daily satellite imagery in
concert with retrieving the long-term memory from the
past states with the aid of non-linear autoregressive
neural network with external input on a rolling basis
onward. To account for the potential impact of
long-term hydrological droughts, telecommunication
signals were included on a seasonal basis in the Upper
Colorado River basin which provides 97percent of the
inflow into Lake Mead. Identification of teleconnection
patterns at a local scale is challenging, largely due
to the coexistence of non-stationary and non-linear
signals embedded within the ocean-atmosphere system.
Empirical mode decomposition as well as wavelet
analysis are used to extract the intrinsic trend and
the dominant oscillation of the sea surface temperature
(SST) and precipitation time series. After finding
possible associations between the dominant oscillation
of seasonal precipitation and global SST through lagged
correlation analysis, the statistically significant
index regions in the oceans are extracted. With these
characterized associations, individual contribution of
these SST forcing regions that are linked to the
related precipitation responses are further quantified
through the use of the extreme learning machine.
Results indicate that the non-leading SST regions also
contribute saliently to the terrestrial precipitation
variability compared to some of the known leading SST
regions and confirm the capability of predicting the
hydrological drought events one season ahead of time.
With such an integrated advancement, an early warning
system can be constructed to bridge the current gap in
source water monitoring for water supply.",