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The following is a guest post authored by Ben Hodges, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin Center for Research in Water Resources.
Although many of us are sweltering in record-breaking heat, a recent Wall Street Journal story about the race to shore up aging, damaged levee systems along the Mississipi River reminds us that flood season is just around the corner. And according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the multi-billion dollar restoration won’t be done by spring.
Deciding where to begin is a complex task. But with the right mix of technology and expertise, engineers could have a snapshot of how a river and its tributaries will behave in flood situations and other extreme weather conditions, allowing them to prioritize levee restoration efforts according to which areas are at highest risk of flooding, and when that’s likely to happen.
As part of a Research collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, IBM has come up with a new technology that could provide such a snapshot. 
This new flood prediction technology can simulate tens of thousands of river branches at a time and could scale further to predict the behavior of millions of branches simultaneously. By coupling analytics software with advanced weather simulation models, such as IBM’s Deep Thunder, municipalities and disaster response teams could make emergency plans and pinpoint potential flood areas on a river.
Floods are the most common natural disaster in the United States, but traditional flood prediction methods are focused only on the main stems of the largest rivers – overlooking extensive tributary networks where flooding actually starts, and where flash floods threaten lives and property.
As a testing ground, the team is presently applying the model to predict the entire 230 mile-long Guadalupe River and over 9,000 miles of tributaries in Texas. In a single hour the system can currently generate up to 100 hours of river behavior.
By combining IBM’s complex system modeling with UT Austin’s research into river physics, we’ve developed new ways to look at an old problem. Unlike previous methods, the IBM approach scales-up for massive networks and has the potential to simulate millions of river miles at once. With the use of river sensors integrated into web-based information systems, we can take this model even further.
In addition to flood prediction, a similar system could be used for irrigation management, helping to create equitable irrigation plans and ensure compliance with habitat conservation efforts. The models could allow managers to evaluate multiple “what if” scenarios to create better plans for handling both droughts and water surplus.
James Downing, supervisor, San Jose Stormwater Management Program
Another person for a smarter planet
San Jose, California, has nearly 30,000 storm drain inlets leading to 1,200 outfalls that pour into 136 miles of creeks and streams. James Downing, one of the city’s three Stormwater Management Program supervisors, helps monitor all of it. He works to keep the water that drains from the city’s streets into all those creeks clean — and keep the city of San Jose compliant with some pretty stringent state and federal water quality regulations.
Big job. Huge responsibility. Luckily, help has arrived in the form of Creek Watch, an iPhone app from IBM Research that empowers citizens to monitor and report on local water conditions.
“We need all the help we can get to protect our watershed. No municipality can do it alone,” Downing said. “Volunteers have long helped the city with various environmental projects and now Creek Watch offers a new opportunity for countless citizens to collect and share meaningful water quality information.” Continue Reading »
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Like many good business ideas, IBM’s plunge into water management technology started with its own pain. The story is told in Charles Fishman’s new book, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. Fishman warns that the era of easy water is over. “The new water scarcity will reshape how we live, how we work, how we relax. It will reshape how we value water, and how we understand it,” Fishman writes. The managers at IBM’s chip plant just outside Burlington, Vt., had their consciousness reshaped before many others did. Water is plentiful for them, but they use a lot of it and the water they use has to be ultra-pure, so it’s mighty expensive.
At the Burlington plant, IBM creates huge quantities of purified water for washing delicate components during the semiconductor manufacturing process–1.7 million gallons a day. The bill for purified water is nearly $10,000 per day, including the cost of water, chemicals and energy. It used to be much higher–more like $20,000. But, starting more than a decade ago, under pressure to cut costs, IBM’s managers realized that situation was unsustainable. So they launched a water management initiative that ultimately became a data-rich system for managing all of the water used in the plant. And that system grew up to be the company’s Smarter Water business. “Burlington has helped IBM change the way it thinks about itself,” writes Fishman. “IBM wants to do for its customers–for companies, for cities, for utilities, for whole natural ecosystems–what it has done in IBM Burlington.”
For IBM, natural resource management has evolved over the past decade from an internal discipline into an expression of global advocacy. The company’s annual corporate social responsibility report lays out the internal benefits of conservation and environmental sustainability. For instance, IBM saved over $50 million in electricity expenses and conserved 523,000 megawatt hours of electricity since 2008. The company’s global conservation program involves 3,100 conservation projects at more than 350 IBM facilities in 49 countries. Conservation is a good investment, too. Over the years, IBM estimates that its focus on environmental sustainability has realized savings and avoided costs at a rate of approximately $1.60 for every $1.00 spent.
As the Smarter Planet business initiatives continue to develop, those savings will increasingly be supplemented with new revenues. IBM’s experience points to a big, convenient truth: conservation is good for business.
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IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Today, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens are gathering to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
To see a live video of the event, click here. To learn more about the event, click here. To follow or participate via Twitter, use #icities.
Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.
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If you live or travel in Africa these days, there’s a phrase you’ll hear a lot: this is Africa’s time. It’s an expression of a rising sense of optimism about the potential for the African economies. Within Africa and around the world, there’s hope that modern technologies and market-based systems will help to provide the boost that they need to become more successful.
IBM shares the optimism. It sees the potential to work alongside its clients and partners to play a leading role in Africa as it becomes a vibrant player in the global economy.
The company displayed its commitment to Africa today when it announced the opening of a new subsidiary in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania—a continuation of its geographic expansion on the African continent. This is the third subsidiary to be established this year, following those Ghana and Senegal. IBM now has employees in 20 African countries. More branch offices are coming.
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by Tamin Pechet
A CNN reporter recently tweeted that CNN’s “investigation into outrageous water bills topped Charlie Sheen on CNN.com.”
Water has long been out of sight and out of mind for most Americans. Now, however, with water needs growing increasingly acute, higher bills aren’t the only issue gaining attention. Continue Reading »
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In the next couple of years, there are expected to be 2 billion people connected to the Internet. At the same time, the instrumentation and interconnection of the world’s human-made and natural systems is exploding–which could mean that there soon will be more things connected to the Internet than there are people who are connected. This Internet of Things promises to give people a much better understanding of how complex systems work, so they can be tinkered with to make them work better. But it also opens up a whole new sphere of insecurity. Each of those sensors is, potentially, a point of vulnerability to people who write malicious code for fun, or profit, or to further their political goals.
Andreas Wespi
Harm could come in many forms, but some of the most hurtful scenarios for attacks on the Internet of Things include electrical power and communications blackouts, disruption of air traffic and roadway traffic lights, interruption of oil and gas exploration and contamination of water. So far, these concerns are mostly theoretical, but the spread of Stuxnet, the computer worm that targets control systems at nuclear power plants, shows just how dangerous such attacks can be. The worm knocked out about 1,000 centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant last year–and atomic energy experts warn that it has the capability of creating Chernobyl-like disasters. “We have to understand the new threats and understand how to protect our own infrastructure,” says Andreas Wespi, a cybersecurity expert at IBM Research’s Zurich laboratory.
Attacks will likely come in two ways: to the sensors and to the servers that gather, store, and analyze information from the sensors. Both kinds of vulnerability must be addressed.
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By David Bartlett
How can a hospital ensure thousands of pieces of clinical equipment are where they need to be when they are needed? How can a utility prevent breaks in vast networks of underground water mains, some dating back hundreds of years? How can power companies maintain their grids and reduce the number of power outages with fewer truck rolls?
Those are the kinds of challenges that are bringing together 7,000 clients, partners and IBMers at the annual PULSE conference in Las Vegas this week. Continue Reading »
As IBM celebrates 100 years of innovation, we’re exploring how the company has pursued progress over the last century in three ways: Pioneering the science of information, changing the way the world works, and reinventing the modern corporation. As we both reflect and look ahead, it’s interesting to note how the world around us has also changed and to imagine what it will look like in another hundred years.
Over the last century, global water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth, impacting society across the board from public health to economics to energy consumption. Obviously, this supply and demand ratio isn’t sustainable, and big changes in the way we manage this precious resource are an imperative.
Collaboration among companies, municipal and government leaders, water managers and citizens will be essential as we continue to look for new ways to innovate in the water management industry. And while much data is being collected, we’ve got to find better ways of using that data to make difficult decisions about how, when and where we’re using our water supply. Data collection is one thing – but finding value in vast amounts of data, streaming in realtime or near realtime from a wide variety of sources, is another. The advent of the deep QA (Question and Answer) technology that powers the Watson computing system presents a unique opportunity to rapidly analyze information and find answers to difficult questions.
Cameron Brooks, IBM’s director of smarter water management, takes a closer look at the implications for Watson in the water management field here.
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Source: Wikimedia Commons
America’s Cape Cod has long been celebrated as a summer paradise where vacationers enjoy swimming in the surf, digging for clams, and fishing. But there’s trouble in paradise. The Cape is essentially a large sandbar that sits over an aquifer from which residents and visitors draw their water. They have to be very careful about what they take out of the ground and put into it. Most of the houses on the Cape dispose of waste water through septic systems, and that’s causing environmental problems. Nitrogen is building up in the bays on the Cape, depleting oxygen levels and killing shellfish and beneficial plants, and producing blooms of algae. If this keeps up, the Cape won’t continue to be attractive to vacationers–who provide the financial lifeblood of the economy.
The people of the Cape are faced with some uncomfortable truths. They must address the waste water problem, most likely by building sewer systems and water treatment facilities. This will cost billions of dollars, which likely will have to come from taxes and user fees.
In an effort to head off environmental and/or financial calamities, the Cape Cod Commission, a regional planning group, has engaged with IBM to create the Smart Cape Cod initiative. The plan is to use sensing, networking, data management, and data analysis technologies to track a wide array of information related to water quality. By understanding the problem better, the commission and the governments of the 15 towns on the Cape hope to be able to address it most effectively–safeguarding the environment and easing the financial burden on residents and businesses. “We have to take innovative approaches,” says Paul Niedzwiecki, the commission’s executive director. “We have a substantial problem but not a lot of existing infrastructure. If we’re smarter about the solutions, we can do it less expensively–without breaking the backs of the year-round residents of the Cape.”
The Cape has just 220,000 year-round residents, but the population can triple during the tourist season. So the new waste water treatment systems will have to be built to handle peak demand. The commission believes that if the people of the Cape address the problem themselves and use innovative technologies and approaches, the fix-up can be done for about $3 billion. It’s possible that only about 40% of the homes will require sewers. But if the towns tarry and are forced to act by state or federal agencies, or courts, the tab could be much higher.
