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Significance of storm spatiotemporal variability and movement in flood hydrodynamic modelling
(2024)
This dissertation aims to explore the impact of various storm properties on computational flood modelling and to propose a method for integrating them into flood risk assessment. It focuses on three key areas:
Firstly, it examines within-storm variability, investigating how variations in storm intensity, duration, and spatial distribution affect runoff dynamics. Through a systematic theoretical approach, the study generates synthetic rainfall signals with different hyetograph variabilities and applies them to a hydrodynamic model. The results highlight the significant influence of storm spatiotemporal variability on runoff response, affecting peak discharge, hydrograph shapes, and flooded areas. Temporal variability emerges as particularly dominant, overshadowing spatial variability and other storm properties such as return period and volume. The study emphasizes the spatial dependency of these effects within the drainage network.
Secondly, it investigates the role of storm movement in flood modelling, recognizing its potential to alter runoff dynamics and inundation patterns. By generating synthetic rain hyetographs traversing the catchment area at varying velocities and directions, the study shows that storm movement significantly impacts runoff response and flood extents. Higher storm velocities lead to more pronounced peaks and faster runoff onsets, resulting in larger flooded areas. The direction of storm movement plays a crucial role, with storms aligning with the average stream direction causing the highest peaks and flooded areas. The magnitude of this influence varies depending on the location within the catchment.
Finally, the dissertation introduces a dynamic spatiotemporal rainfall model aimed at preserving storm event properties. Using an event-based approach, dynamic precipitation events are identified and regenerated, ensuring the conservation of storm spatiotemporal variability and movement characteristics. This facilitates the generation of more physically plausible and spatiotemporally coherent precipitation time series. The model prioritizes user accessibility, offering a practical tool for integrating storm properties into flood computation modelling and risk analysis frameworks. By addressing these aspects of storm behaviour, the dissertation contributes to enhancing the accuracy and effectiveness of flood modelling, thereby improving flood risk mitigation efforts.
Resonance phenomena are ubiquitous in Nature. Resonance means that a system can accumulate large amounts of kinetic energy. In rotating flows inertial waves provide a mechanism for resonance by redistributing momentum, kinetic energy and helicity.
In order to investigate inertial waves a Taylor-Couette system was investigated which consists of a homogeneous liquid confined between two coaxial cylinders and two rigid lids. The inner cylinder is slightly conical (frustum) to break the vertical mirror symmetry. Inertial waves were excited by two different forcing configurations: the frustum in libration and the lids together with the outer cylinder in libration. Libration means that the rotation rate of the wall is modulated with a fixed amplitude and frequency of the order of the mean rotation rate. Direct numerical simulations (DNS) were conducted with a numerical solver in terrain-following coordinates.
DNS results reveal that inertial wave excitation is localised at the edges of the confinement, which is in very good agreement with recent laboratory measurements of Seelig (2014, PhD thesis, BTU Cottbus - Senftenberg). A model of the wave excitation mechanism was developed with the aid of boundary layer theory. The model suggests that a difference in the boundary layer mass flux (Ekman flux) excites the waves by driving an excess Ekman pumping velocity at the edges. The DNS results exhibit this flux difference, and the simulated kinetic energy spectra of the waves exhibit the frequency dependency predicted by the model.
However, DNS results also exhibit helical vortices at the edges which are not part of the model. Conservation properties suggest that these vortices are merely a compensating phenomenon which tends to stabilise the boundary layer flow. The details of this flow, however, appear less important for the wave excitation.
Response spectra of the kinetic energy, the dissipation rate, the helicity, and the quality factor were computed in order to assess resonance conditions. Simulated resonance peaks have a width of only 1/20th of the mean rotation rate. At these peaks, the kinetic energy was found to increase by a factor 10-50 even though viscous forces were still rather large (Ekman number of the order 1/100,000 with the length scale given by the mean radial gap width).
The flow patterns found at those resonances were investigated and found to be in very good agreement with the spatial patterns obtained by laboratory measurements and geometric ray tracing. The DNS results suggest that there are two types of resonance in rotating flows: modes and wave attractors. In contrast to a mode, a wave attractor exhibits net focusing of wave energy and occupies a finite frequency band. DNS results show that the wave attractor resonance frequency adjusts within the frequency band which suggests that wave attractor resonances complement 'classical' mode resonances and may, thus, be relevant in various applications.
Die zeitliche Variabilität des Niederschlages auf Skalen von Jahren bis hin zu Ereignissen ist von wesentlicher Bedeutung für die Untersuchung hydrologischer Prozesse. Langjährige Reihen von Niederschlagsdaten mit einer hohen zeitlichen Auflösung stehen nur selten zur Verfügung. Eine Möglichkeit, die Einflüsse der Variabilität von Niederschlägen auf die hydrologischen Prozesse dennoch zu quantifizieren, ist es, stochastisch generierte Reihen als Eingangsdaten für hydrologische Modelle zu nutzen. In dieser Arbeit wurde ein stochastischer Niederschlagsgenerator der aus zwei Stufen besteht, entwickelt. Zunächst erfolgt die Generierung von Niederschlagsereignissen durch ein Poisson-Rectangular-Pulse (PRP) Modell, anschließend werden diese Ereignisse durch eine mikrokanonische multiplikative Zufallskaskade disaggregiert. Die Methodik wurde in die frei zugängliche Software R implementiert.
Flooding of dry sediments is known to trigger pulses of microbial respiration at land-water-interfaces. The regulation of discharge variability is therefore proposed to affect the respiration balance of these sites. In this study, I assessed the impact of discharge regulation on microbial respiration associated to surface sediments at a land-water-interface of the river Spree. I developed a theoretical model, based on empirical respiration data, to estimate the two-month total respiration at the study site for three discharge scenarios. The real scenario represented the actual discharge at the study site, which was regulated by the Spremberg reservoir dam. In the unregulated scenario, the regulating effect by the dam was excluded. In the extremely regulated scenario, a hypothetical constant discharge was modeled. For each scenario, the daily discharge, the corresponding flooded areas, the extent of dry or rewetted areas, and the durations of flooding or rewetting by rain at the study site were determined. Microbial respiration rates associated to surface sediments were measured with a respirometer under flooded, dry, and rewetted conditions. The model applied these rates to the respective flooded, dry or rewetted areas of the study site, to calculate the daily areal respiration. In all sediments from the land-water-interface, a distinctive respiration pulse was measured on the first day of flooding, and higher respiration rates under flooded than under dry conditions. The discharge of the unregulated scenario was characterized by a higher variability and larger flow volume than the regulated real scenario. Due to the higher total discharge, larger areas were flooded in the unregulated scenario, the total respiration from sediments under long-term flooded conditions was therefore higher. Moreover, the daily extent of flooded areas fluctuated more strongly, hence more short-term respiration pulses upon flooding were triggered than in the real regulated scenario. The calculated total two-month respiration of the unregulated scenario exceeded that of the regulated real scenario by almost 14 %. These results suggest that discharge regulation can have a considerable negative impact on sediment-associated microbial respiration at land-water-interfaces.
Even though production and use of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) are globally banned, their historical applications continue to result in releases to the environment and may still cause adverse effects on biota and human health. This thesis investigates contamination pathways to establish source-sink relationships using data science techniques, including multivariate statistics and machine learning. The research focuses exemplarily on fish, as they are an important component of global ecosystems and human nutrition, and analyses data primarily from the NE Atlantic, the Baltic Sea, and German inland waters. Instead of total concentrations, the ICES-7 PCB congeners were selected to compute specific congener profiles for each observation, representing the fractions of CB28, CB52, CB101, CB118, CB138, CB153, and CB180.
The results show that three contamination pathways could explain most of the profile variations observed in fish: (1) fractionated emissions transported via the atmosphere, (2) degraded consumption which enters inland waters through particle-bound runoff, and (3) remobilized degraded consumptions that subsequently enters the atmosphere from contaminated soils. These pathways reflect the dominant transport mechanisms of PCB sources to fish and support observations of changing soil dynamics, where soils increasingly act as secondary sources rather than sinks. By modeling the pathways mentioned above, so-called shadow profiles were computed from historical consumption and projected emissions data, representing country-specific contamination pathways into fish. This modeling enabled the linkage between computed shadow and observed fish profiles using self-organizing maps (SOM) as a dimension-reduction and pattern-structuring method. The results indicated plausible relationships between fish contamination profiles and shadow profiles of major PCB-consuming countries in Western Europe – particularly Germany – as well as former USSR countries. To date, no attempt has been made to link PCB contamination in fish on a broader scale by assigning potential source countries through their PCB profile. With its findings, this thesis provides new insights into contamination patterns and pathways, identifies potential source countries, and demonstrates a framework for applying data science techniques to investigate and link sources and sinks of PCB contamination. The gained knowledge could improve monitoring measures and support regulations.
