Researchers at the University of California, Irvine who study the behavior of fire embers have determined the majority of fire damage in major wildfires comes from embers that have the ability to move far away from the actual burn site.
“It’s basically a win-win for almost everybody, the express lanes,” said UC Irvine economics professor Jan Brueckner, a member of the university’s Institute of Transportation Studies. … Sarah Catz, a UC Irvine transportation researcher and former OCTA board member, said another benefit of the express lane tolls is they bring in a consistent revenue stream to be used for maintenance. “There isn’t enough money out there for all the maintenance that has to be done on our roads, unfortunately,” Catz said.
Ride-hailing is not only for the young. An analysis of data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey found that highly educated, affluent seniors in urban areas were among those who were more likely to be adopters of ride-hailing services. Often, these adults must give up their licenses, especially if they have a medical condition, said Suman Kumar Mitra, an assistant project scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Irvine. … Safety is a concern for this population, too, he said. But he surmises that the benefits of the services outweigh the safety concerns.
One of the many ways modern societies lose valuable drinking water is through toilets. So says environmental engineer Stanley Grant of the University of California, Irvine. He and colleagues study ways to manage the water supply in urban areas. And given increasing drought due to global warming, the topic has never been more urgent.
More places will have to develop robust programs to restore groundwater that provide multiple “access points” for surface water to seep into the aquifer, University of California, Irvine civil engineer Brett Sanders said. Large basins serve as primary access points for groundwater to filter downward, holding large amounts of runoff and recycled wastewater that trickle into aquifers. Communities also must add smaller green spaces to improve storage and prevent flooding by helping more water get into the ground, he said.
“We must investigate this for every single pipe we put hydrogen into,” said Jack Brouwer, director of the advanced power and energy program at the University of California, Irvine, “but it’s a phenomenon we can manage because it’s slow.” Problem pipes and compressors could be replaced over the course of years, he said. Or pipes could be protected with coatings applied from the inside by robotic devices called pigs that are currently used for pipeline inspection and maintenance.
According to Jack Brouwer, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center and the Advanced Power and Energy Program at UC Irvine, deciding the right number and type of zero-emission buses depends on many factors, including the electrical grid infrastructure, the bus routes, and the road type. Battery electric buses, for example, consume more power on hilly roads. Read More
“In most cases, we do not know how much groundwater exists in storage,” write the authors of a study published last month in Water Resources Research (WRR), a journal of the American Geophysical Union. ... One-third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are highly stressed to over-stressed, according to a companion study published in the same issue of WRR. ... Scientists at the University of California, Irvine led both studies, with doctoral student Alexandra Richey serving as lead author.
“Documenting what happened in Melbourne during the Millennium Drought was a real eye-opener,” said paper co-author Stanley Grant, a civil and environmental engineer at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s like looking into what the future could be for California if we got our act together.”
The wordmarks below are for use in print communications. Formal and informal versions are available in horizontal or vertical formats. The formal version is designed for all purposes, but particularly those targeted to external audiences. The informal version is best suited for internal audiences, or on secondary reference. The JPG file format has a white background, while PNG has a transparent background. To download, see the right sidebar for options. If you have any questions, please contact the Communications Department.
