Big data analytics: A watershed management perspective

The toolsets for big data analytics are constantly growing, with new technologies being added by the day. However, the widely used open-source Apache Hadoop framework provides a useful starting point for understanding the basic elements of a big data analytics system as shown in a particular implementation called Apache Ambari (Figure 1). Hadoop enables the distribution of large data sets into...

Big data and big data analytics are beginning to be applied for watershed management. Their use has come to the forefront in many urban situations where existing physical infrastructure and real-time monitoring systems (i.e., SCADA) that have been traditionally used for operational control and decision-making can be combined with non-traditional data, watershed modeling, and new and improved...

The Grassland Water District (GWD) is a subbasin of California’s San Joaquin River that is working on the development of a functional sensor network delivering data to improve scheduling of saline drainage into the environmentally sensitive river. Near real-time data are collected from flow and conductivity sensors throughout the GWD and along the river. This information is then integrated...

The Southern Ontario Water Consortium, together with IBM and the University of Waterloo, have collaborated to install 120 hydrologic sensors and seven weather stations in the 80-square kilometer (km2) Alder Creek sub-watershed of the Grand River (Rudolph, 2014). The real-time watershed environmental data from these sensors and stations are gathered into the IBM Intelligent Operations...

Big data and associated analytics have made a difference in many water resource areas, including watershed applications and in particular for urban catchments. However, application of big data analytics to larger, more heterogeneous watersheds has lagged, due in part to the complexities of analytical needs to support decision-making. Resource managers have nonetheless been able to increase the...

SNC-Lavalin’s Atkins business Senior Project Manager Sabu Paul is based in the company’s Alexandria, Virginia office. Vice President Henry Manguerra works from SNC-Lavalin’s Atkins business office in Los Angeles, California. LimnoTech Senior Engineer Tad Slawecki is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This article is based on...