Canals--Florida

Stable isotopes of water are used as tracers for characterizing surface water/groundwater interactions. Gaps in sampling protocol for these tracers in low gradient canals limits their use in studies of canal-groundwater exchanges. Several sampling methods were developed to determine the temporal and spatial isotopic variation in a canal. The influence of a flow control gate on isotopic composition and the sensitivity of isotope mixing calculations to choice of sampling method were also evaluated. There was little variability in the isotopic composition of the canal along a cross section perpendicular flow. Some variation occurred monthly and seasonally. The greatest variability occurred between the upstream and downstream side of the flow control gates when the gates were closed. Mixing calculations were not sensitive to the choice of sampling method. This study shed light on isotope sampling methods in canals for canal-groundwater interactions studies.

Environmental simulations are computationally very demanding. South Florida Water Management District has implemented the Everglades Landscape Model (ELM) to simulate the ecosystem in South Florida. The current implementation parallelizes all of the model except the canal system. This thesis describes the parallelization of the canal system. We study the canal system and its interaction with the rest of the ELM, and created three distinct parallel implementations. Two of the methods, one-do-all and all-do-all, provide parallelism via task replication while the third method, task-parallel, decomposes the canal system into tasks and uses a locality-based heuristic algorithm to schedule the tasks. We analyze the performance of three methods and discuss future directions for parallelization of the ELM and other environmental models.