CE 394K.2                              Final Exam                             Spring 2008

Hydrology

There are three questions on this exam.   Do all three questions.  For each question, prepare a 2-page typed theme paper.  Staple all three solutions together in the order of the questions, and turn in the result to the EWRE secretary in ECJ 8.6 by 5PM on Thursday, May 8.  This is a take-home exam.  You are honor bound not to discuss this exam with your colleagues in the class.  Your answers should be the result of your work and thought alone.  Be assured that if essentially the same idea appears in answers from more than one person, it is fairly easy to recognize that when the grading is being done.  If that happens, it is not clear from whom the idea originated and who is just using somebody else’s knowledge.  So, keep your ideas to yourself!

The term papers that you choose to describe in answering Questions 1 and 2 can be found at: http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/GradHydro2008/Docs/TermProjList.htm

What I am looking for in grading your answers in all three questions is:

·         Knowledge of the facts.  Make sure you lay out the facts of what has actually been done before you start offering opinions about what could have or should have been done.  This particularly applies to the discussion of term.  Make sure you discuss what was actually done not just about the general subject itself.

·         Thoughtful evaluation.   How do you evaluate the advantages and limitations of the principles, methods and data that have been used?   How does the knowledge you’ve learned in this class relate to the world around us?   I am looking for a sense of reflection here, of seeing you set individual situations and facts in a larger context in an intelligent way.

Questions

1. Compare and Contrast Two Applications Dealing with the same Theme

Choose two term papers that deal with the same or similar themes or topics.  Neither of these papers should be your own term paper.  Briefly summarize the contents of the papers (the problem examined, the method of analysis, the results achieved).   Compare and contrast the approaches to the problem that the two papers took.  Which technical approach do you think was more effective?  Why?  Which paper does a more effective job of communicating its results?  Why?  Suppose you were undertaking a study of this same subject.  Having studied these two papers, what have you learned about how to go about your investigation effectively?  What would you do differently from what the authors of these papers did?

2.  Future of Urban Hydrology

The water quality theme that we pursued with Dr Barrett this semester, and the several term papers that deal with urban hydrology in the term project list, provide an opportunity to think about the future of urban hydrology.   I would like you to write a 2-page concept paper that cites information from at least five of the class term papers and presents a vision for how you feel the future of urban hydrology should be pursued.    How can we use modeling better than we are now?  How do we take advantage of LIDAR and digital orthophotos?  How do we better integrate data and modeling? How do we use web services?  How can we better use Nexrad data? How can we more precisely evaluate urban water management alternatives for flooding, water quality and stream erosion?  How do we better connect water flow and quality? In answering this question, think about “what questions are we trying to answer?”  “What data are needed to answer these questions?”  “What modeling is needed to answer these questions?”  “What are we doing now?”  “How could we do this better in the future?”

3.  Water Web Services

In homework 4, you used a version of the CUAHSI web services application for Excel, and Tim Whiteaker has made a number of improvements as a result of our homework exercise. In particular a “Statistics and Charts” component was added by Bryan Enslein and he has reworked the solution to Homework 4 using that component as shown at:

http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/GradHydro2008/Hmwk4/Hmwk4Soln.doc

Tim has also uploaded the Excel 2003 and 2007 versions of this application to our ftp site at

ftp://ftp.crwr.utexas.edu/pub/outgoing/Whiteaker/WaterOneFlow-Excel-Client

The spreadsheet relies on software called HydroObjects in order to talk to web services, so you will need to install that before you work with the spreadsheet.

1.      Go to http://www.cuahsi.org/his/toolkit.html , and click to download the HydroObjects Setup File.

2.      Unzip all contents to a temporary folder on your local drive, and run Setup.exe.  Note: the zip file contains an older version of the spreadsheet.  Ignore it.

3.      Once HydroObjects is installed, open WaterOneFlow.xls if you are using Office 2003, or WaterOneFlow.xlsm if you are using Office 2007.

Make sure macros are enabled, and then click away.  Let Tim know if you have any questions.  His email is [email-masked].  Tim’s phone number at CRWR is 471-0570.

Please answer the following three questions:

(a)     Choose a particular web service WSDL, choose a particular time series or set of time series provided at this data service, and use the web services client to create a description of these data, and what you can learn from them, similar to what you did in Homework 4.  You can learn more about the Waters Testbed Sites at: http://www.watersnet.org/wtbs/index.html   You can learn more about the CUAHSI web services at: http://www.cuahsi.org//his/webservices.html

(b)   Please provide comments as to the functionality of this application – bugs you encountered and any suggestions you have for its improvement.

(c)    Take two time series from the web services and make a t-test of the differences between them. Is one series significantly different from the other?

Note: If you open the Excel Worksheet in MS Excel 2007, and none of the Macros work, you need to change the security setting on Excel.  To do this, go to the Office Button in the top left corner of the Excel Worksheet, and choose the Excel Options tab at the bottom of the page.

Choose  from among the options on the left side of the next menu, then  in the next page, then Macro Settings and Enable all macros.  Shut down your WaterOneFlow Excel application and reopen the spreadsheet and it should work.