Hydrophobic organic chemicals (HOCs) are a class of environmental contaminants responsible for numerous acute and chronic health effects in humans and wildlife. This thesis illustrates three applications of polyethylene ...

Soil moisture plays a major role in the global hydrologic cycle. Most importantly, soil moisture controls the partitioning of available energy at the land surface into latent and sensible heat fluxes. We investigate the ...

Irrigated agriculture is an essential component of global food production. In many regions of the world, and Asia in particular, groundwater is a major source of irrigation water. Over-pumping of groundwater aquifers has ...

Coastal erosion and, more generally, evolution of the beach morphology are major coastal engineering problems. Changes in beach morphology mostly occur in the nearshore region, or surf zone. They are caused by the local ...

Demand for providing scalable distributed GIS services has been growing greatly as the Internet continues to boom. However, currently available data representations for these services are limited by a deficiency of scalability ...

The Thin-Layer Method (TLM) is a semi-analytical technique that is efficient for wave propagation problems involving partially heterogeneous media. While the method has been used widely for horizontally stratified media, ...

This dissertation investigates the stability of wellbores drilled in Ko-consolidated clays using non-linear finite element method (FEM) and effective stress soil models to characterize the behavior of clay and unconsolidated ...

Climate variability has emerged in recent decades as an important field of geoscience research. A thorough understanding of the patterns and causes of climate variability is required to predict and prepare for upcoming ...