Current News - Riverside Technology, inc.

Precipitation frequency estimates are used to determine runoff and flow rates for specific design events. This information is necessary to properly design storm drains, ponds, culverts and water quality facilities ensuring they are adequately sized to handle the amount of water. If the structures or facilities are too small, the risk of flooding will be high. If they are too big, designers are wasting money. Several Riverside staff members work on-site at the Hydrometeorological Design Studies Center (HDSC) – the NOAA center responsible for generating and releasing this valuable information. The updated precipitation frequency estimate maps have been released for the following 17 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. These estimates are used in almost all infrastructure design in the USA. Riverside staff played a key role in this enormous project that included the following activities:

• Formatting and analyzing extreme precipitation data collected by 40 agencies at more than 25,000 locations (and also, temperature and snowfall data at high elevation stations;
• Performing a range of tasks related to at-station frequency analysis for each of 19 durations independently;
• Spatially interpolated at-station estimates at each of 10 return periods and 19 durations, and assured consistency in estimates across all return periods and durations (190 combinations);
• Generating approximated 3000 ASCII files with high resolution grids of precipitation and rainfall frequency estimates and corresponding lower and upper bounds of the 90% confidence interval that are available for download from the PFDS;
• Creating 290 high quality cartographic maps of precipitation frequency estimates for selected return periods and durations.

Justin Kattnig was the recipient of the Riverside Scholarship for Colorado State University, 2012-2013 academic year. Justin is a third year student at CSU majoring in Civil Engineering. He has been a research assistant for various hydrology and water quality projects concerning the Arkansas River. Justin will be graduating in 2013. In addition to being a full-time student, Justin realizes the value in giving back to the community by participating in organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America. Congratulations Justin!

Riverside was awarded a project to develop an internal and external web portal for the Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office (ENTRO). The portal will permit access to water resources datasets in the Eastern Nile Region to facilitate access to data for modeling purposes and to permit modeling results to be updated and shared with users. The portal will also permit ENTRO to manage core business processes through an internally facing web interface. Riverside has successfully implemented similar systems addressing organization-wide data management, system integration, and decision support requirements for a variety of organizations including the Nile Basin Initiative, Morocco Economic Competitiveness Program, the State of Colorado, the Nebraska Community Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Completion is scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year.

The Cooperative Hydrology Study (COHYST) group was formed over a decade ago and consists of several Nebraskan agencies and organizations. The purpose of this group is to work cooperatively “to improve understanding of the hydrological and geological conditions in the Platte Basin in Nebraska upstream of Columbus, Nebraska.” Through this project, Riverside will accurately classify land use at an appropriate spatial resolution so model uncertainty can be minimized and COHYST management objectives can be achieved. By analyzing multiple years, temporal variability also will be captured, and resultant impacts on model outputs can be assessed. Additionally, the developed satellite-based land use classification methodology should be straightforward in its application to allow COHYST staff to analyze additional historical datasets as required. This project provides Riverside another opportunity to extend its commitment to improving water and land resources management in the western United States.