Assela Pathirana

Seminar titled 'I can teach as much as I like but does it lead to learning? Musings on teaching learning and related things' given 2012-MAR-29 at UNESCO-IHE Water colloquium.

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Random musings on various topics: Climate and water security, Small Island Developing States (SIDS), IT tools, Computer programming and Web-Applications, Citizen Science, ... Views are personal!

The book on Climate Change, Extreme Rainfall and Urban Drainage Some members of International Group on Urban Rainfall (IGUR) of IWA/IAHR Joint Committee on Urban Drainage[1] has produced a book on the topic on the influence on climate and other forms of future change on extreme rainfall and the implications on urban drainage systems. In addition to a state-of-the-art overview of existing methodologies and relevant results related to the assessment of the climate change impacts on urban rainfall extremes as well as on urban hydrology and hydraulics, it contains a number of tutorials on how to use the described techniques in practice. One example is an easy-to-use tutorial on how to use [Category:WRF_Model|WRF model] on personal computers. This is a similar to -- but very much improved (therefore easier to use) -- the framework described in the article "Running WRF Model on Windows". read more... SWMM5-Python This is a python module for running SWMM5 model via python and extract results as python objects. Read more.. IMHEN Report on Climte Change in Vietnam (C) Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment (IMHEN), Vietnam. IMHEN conducted the project "Impact of climate change on water resources and adaptation measures" sponsored by the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark with the participation of consulting experts from the Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI) and the participation of many Vietnamese agencies. read more

Using Wiki in Higher-Education: Application in organizing research groups This is a natural extension of the story of this web site. I started this web site in 2006 hacking MediaWiki software. That was just before I moved from Japan to Netherlands and started working at UNESCO-IHE. From the end of 2006, I used the same contraption to support my research group at UNESCO-IHE (which consisted of five six masters students every year, myself and one or two other faculty members). The experiment completed its fifth year in 2011. I was thinking this is the time to document the experience when I came to know that Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Journal is publishing special issue on Hydrology education in a changing world]. Recently the article finished the review cycle and was published in HESS. Read More ... Improving Drinking Water Quality without Compromising Long-term Safety Treating water with chlorine is a time-tested way of ensuring biological safety of drinking water. However, excessive chlorination creates chlorination by-products, that are known to cause long-term risk of cancer. We attempted to make a safe compromise. We integrated EPANET2.0 (a steady-stage, demand-driven water distribution network model), a particle back-tracking algorithm (can trace the origin of water delivered at any demand point in the network), chlorine and disinfection by product model and a multi-objective optimization algorithm to enable computing the optimal water treatment, minimizing long-term chemical risk (represented as cancer treatment cost.) Read more... EPANET-Python When I started teaching programming for water professionals at UNESCO-IHE, I was compelled to use C/C++ as the language. This is due to the fact that EPANET2.0 and EPA-SWMM5.0 (Two main programes, students in my department had to learn) were written in C language. However, C/C++ is a horrible first language. Students have to cover at least three days of learning of arcane syntax and rules before they begin to write some semi-useful code. On the other hand, if I could conduct the classes in Python, they will see the `light' within a few hours! They can start doing interesting and useful things from the very beginning of the study. What a way to stimulate learning! I wanted to make it possible to call EPANET2 and EPA-SWMM5.0 procedures from python. Following is the first attempt: Read More...

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