Nitin Muttil | Victoria University (original) (raw)
Papers by Nitin Muttil
Water
A rigorous evaluation of future hydro-climatic changes is necessary for developing climate adapta... more A rigorous evaluation of future hydro-climatic changes is necessary for developing climate adaptation strategies for a catchment. The integration of future climate projections from general circulation models (GCMs) in the simulations of a hydrologic model, such as the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), is widely considered as one of the most dependable approaches to assess the impacts of climate alteration on hydrology. The main objective of this study was to assess the potential impacts of climate alteration on the hydrology of the Yarra River catchment in Victoria, Australia, using the SWAT model. The climate projections from five GCMs under two Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios—RCP 4.5 and 8.5 for 2030 and 2050, respectively—were incorporated into the calibrated SWAT model for the analysis of future hydrologic behaviour against a baseline period of 1990–2008. The SWAT model performed well in its simulation of total streamflow, baseflow, and runoff, with Nas...
In the recent past, machine learning (ML) techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANN) hav... more In the recent past, machine learning (ML) techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANN) have been increasingly used to model algal bloom dynamics. In the present paper, along with ANN, we select genetic programming (GP) for modelling and prediction of algal blooms in Tolo Harbour, Hong Kong. The study of the weights of the trained ANN and also the GP-evolved equations shows that they correctly identify the ecologically significant variables. Analysis of various ANN and GP scenarios indicates that good predictions of long-term trends in algal biomass can be obtained using only chlorophyll-a as input. The results indicate that the use of biweekly data can simulate long-term trends of algal biomass reasonably well, but it is not ideally suited to give short-term algal bloom predictions.
Harmful algal blooms, which are considered a serious environmental problem nowadays, occur in coa... more Harmful algal blooms, which are considered a serious environmental problem nowadays, occur in coastal waters in many parts of the world. They cause acute ecological damage and ensuing economic losses, due to fish kills and shellfish poisoning as well as public health threats posed by toxic blooms. Recently, data-driven models including machine learning (ML) techniques have been employed to mimic dynamics of algal blooms. One of the most important steps in the application of a ML technique is the selection of significant model input variables. In the present paper, we use two extensively used ML techniques, artificial neural networks (ANN) and genetic programming (GP) for selecting the significant input variables. The efficacy of these techniques is first demonstrated on a test problem with known dependence and then they are applied to a real-world case study of water quality data from Tolo Harbour, Hong Kong. These ML techniques overcome some of the limitations of the currently used...
Sustainability
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our times, even before the onset of the Corona... more Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our times, even before the onset of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. One of the main contributors to climate change is greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which are mostly caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels. As the lockdown due to the pandemic has minimised human activity in major cities, GHG emissions have been reduced. This, in turn, is expected to lead to a reduction in the urban heat island (UHI) effect in the cities. The aim of this paper is to understand the relationship between human activity and the UHI intensity and to provide recommendations towards developing a sustainable approach to minimise the UHI effect and improve urban resilience. In this study, historical records of the monthly mean of daily maximum surface air temperatures collected from official weather stations in Melbourne, New York City, Tokyo, Dublin, and Oslo were used to estimate the UHI intensity in these cities. The results sh...
Sustainability
Universities and higher education institutions play an important role in achieving a sustainable ... more Universities and higher education institutions play an important role in achieving a sustainable future through their teaching and by undertaking cutting edge research to combat climate change. There have been several efforts towards a sustainable future and achieving carbon neutrality at higher education institutions in Australia and around the world. This study has reviewed the sustainability strategies of numerous universities in Australia and has identified as study cases six universities that are committed to and leading the implementation of initiatives to achieve carbon neutrality. The initiatives implemented at the selected universities were classified into eight “sustainability categories”, namely, built environment, energy, food and gardens, GHG emissions, natural environment, resource and waste management, transport, and water. Among the selected leading universities in sustainability, Charles Sturt University and the University of Tasmania (UTAS) are the only universitie...
Chan, F., Marinova, D. and Anderssen, R.S. (eds) MODSIM2011, 19th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation.
Chan, F., Marinova, D. and Anderssen, R.S. (eds) MODSIM2011, 19th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation.
Rainfall is the key climatic variable that governs the regional hydrologic cycle and availability... more Rainfall is the key climatic variable that governs the regional hydrologic cycle and availability of water resources. This study aims to perform a spatial analysis of rainfall patterns within the Yarra River catchment, which is a major source of water supply for Melbourne (in Victoria). Thus, any changes in rainfall patterns over this catchment would have implications for the management of water resources within the catchment. A detailed spatial analysis of rainfall patterns over the catchment using annual rainfall data from 64 rainfall stations shows that the rainfall patterns over the catchment can be divided into two rainfall regimes, one with average annual rainfall greater than the average of the entire catchment and the other being less than the average. The two rainfall regimes can be said to be reasonably consistent with the land use pattern, with the majority of the 'greater than average' rainfall stations being in forested areas, while the 'lower than average&#...
IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science
Over the past decade, zero waste emerged as one of the promising concepts for waste management. M... more Over the past decade, zero waste emerged as one of the promising concepts for waste management. Many parties have introduced this concept as a new way of waste management, aiming to reduce as little amount of waste generated as possible and send nothing to landfills. To measure the success of the zero waste implementation, some set of indicators have been developed. Although these were claimed to be successful after their implementation, very often they are not applicable to other regions or countries. Therefore, this study recommends developing the Zero Waste Management Index, which fits with local or regional conditions. This paper will discuss a framework for developing the West Java Zero Waste Management Index (WJZWMI). It will outline urban solid waste problem in West Java, and a brief review of existing zero waste indexes. Further, it will emphasize on the conceptual framework of the WJZWMI, which then results in potential long list indicators as preliminary results of this st...
Piantadosi, J., Anderssen, R.S. and Boland J. (eds) MODSIM2013, 20th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation
Future Internet
Urbanization is a challenge faced by most countries worldwide and leads to several problems. Due ... more Urbanization is a challenge faced by most countries worldwide and leads to several problems. Due to rapid communication capabilities, conforming the megacities into Ubiquitous cities (U-cities) seems to be a potential solution to mitigate the problems caused by urbanization. Extensive reliance and dependencies of U-cities on information and communication technologies (ICTs) bring forth a new set of risks and vulnerabilities to these megacities. This research investigates the vulnerabilities of ICTs against man-made and natural hazards in a systematic way using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The study identifies the vulnerabilities of different ICTs in U-cities and helps in improving the system’s resistivity against various hazards. The task is performed by evaluating the level of disruption on the different technologies and areas under the identified man-made and natural hazards. The research provides an insight into the working mechanisms of involved ICTs. It also helps to manage ...
Hydrology
Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is l... more Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is lately experiencing a growing risk of localized droughts due to inappropriate water resource management and climate change. Such a situation calls for much more efficient use and management of water in Bhutan. This paper undertakes an extensive analysis of the country’s water resources for better planning and management of the available water resources. Bhutan can be divided into three zones, the Southern Foothills, the Central Inner Himalayas, and the Higher Himalayas. The top four leading industries of Bhutan are related to water, either directly or indirectly. The country at present is at a very early stage of development. The government has prioritized water resources management over recent years. Water for hydropower in Bhutan has been in focus as compared to that allocated for irrigation, industries, and environmental demand. The demand for water in Bhutan has also increased in the ...
A key driver of Australia’s economic development is through promoting migration. A strong bottlen... more A key driver of Australia’s economic development is through promoting migration. A strong bottleneck to achieve the targets is a disproportional concentration of population in the metropolitan cities. To avoid congestion in these cities, emphasis is being given at the government level to promote the regional cities. With different city ranking systems, this study tries to identify linkage between the city ranking and people’s preference to live there. The proposed ranking system uses six components, namely, economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and governance. A comparison is done between the ranking systems by first assigning the same weightage to the six components and then assigning different weightages based on people’s preferences. This study considered 112 Australian cities, which were ranked by considering their performance based on the non-weighted and weighted parameters. Analytical Hierarchy Process is then used to assign the priorities/preferences of the compone...
Hydrology, 2021
Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is l... more Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is lately experiencing a growing risk of localized droughts due to inappropriate water resource management and climate change. Such a situation calls for much more efficient use and management of water in Bhutan. This paper undertakes an extensive analysis of the country’s water resources for better planning and management of the available water resources. Bhutan can be divided into three zones, the Southern Foothills, the Central Inner Himalayas, and the Higher Himalayas. The top four leading industries of Bhutan are related to water, either directly or indirectly. The country at present is at a very early stage of development. The government has prioritized water resources management over recent years. Water for hydropower in Bhutan has been in focus as compared to that allocated for irrigation, industries, and environmental demand. The demand for water in Bhutan has also increased in the ...
Spatial estimation of rainfall has many vital applications in water resources management of a bas... more Spatial estimation of rainfall has many vital applications in water resources management of a basin. Conventionally, stochastic methods such as kriging are widely used where the performance of the methods crucially depends on how the variogram model is constructed. In the recent past, attempts have been made to replace the traditional variogram models with universal function approximator based models such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN). In this study, a detailed investigation is done to assess the suitability of Genetic Programming (GP) based universal function approximator as a replacement for traditional variogram models and their performance is evaluated in estimating missing rainfall in two stations in Tamarabarani basin in Peninsular India. The study shows that GP based semi variogram seems to be a potential alternative to the conventional models. This model was further utilized to re-design the rain gauge network of the basin.
Water shortages and increasing urban densities are the main drivers that are challenging many dev... more Water shortages and increasing urban densities are the main drivers that are challenging many developed regions to consider alternative decentralized strategies such as rainwater harvesting, greywater re-use/recycling, sewer mining, urine separation and water demand management to control urban water services. The source management strategies which are implemented in residential area are likely to change sewage quality and quantity in sewer pipes since domestic sewage contributes 60% of the total sewage flows. Several past studies confirmed that the implementation of source management strategies successfully decrease the sewage flow and subsequently increase the sewage strength. Alteration of sewage quantity & quality can cause sewer problems such as blockage, corrosion and odour. An extensive literature study indicates that sewer problems associated with source management strategies can be qualitatively assessed. The results show that water demand management, sewer mining, greywater...
The problem of accurately determining river flows from rainfall, evaporation and other factors, o... more The problem of accurately determining river flows from rainfall, evaporation and other factors, occupies an important place in hydrology. The rainfall-runoff process is believed to be highly non-linear, time varying, spatially distributed and not easily described by simple models. Data-driven modelling approaches have been embraced enthusiastically by practitioners in water resources, as they are perceived to overcome some of the difficulties associated with physics based approaches. Such approaches have proved to be an effective and efficient way to model the rainfall-runoff process in situations where enough data on physical characteristics of catchment is not available or when it is essential to predict the flow in the shortest possible time to enable sufficient time for notification and evacuation procedures. Since, in the recent past, there has been an increasing interest to exploit the capability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in rainfall-runoff modelling, we analy...
Water resources management in Indonesia, particularly on the Island of Java, faces severe water p... more Water resources management in Indonesia, particularly on the Island of Java, faces severe water problems. In its annual report released in 2008, the National Planning and Development Council of Indonesia predicted that cities in Java Island would suffer critical water deficits in 2025, if the current excessive use of water resources continues. This excessive use was mainly caused by the sporadic groundwater extraction for various purposes, including agriculture, industry and household. In the West Java Province, the situation is even worse by the high level of pollution of rivers, in addition to excessive water use. In the past, to address these problems, the local government of West Java Province implemented some programs to manage the use of water resources, such as the enactment of new groundwater regulations and the campaign for clean river. However, these programs were not successful due to lack of awareness and support from various water resource stakeholders (Rahmat & Wangsaa...
This study assesses Human Thermal Comfort in two selected areas: a Green Infrastructure (GI) area... more This study assesses Human Thermal Comfort in two selected areas: a Green Infrastructure (GI) area represented by a garden and a high-rise building area, in the Central Business District (CBD) of Melbourne, Australia. Three-dimensional microclimatic modelling software, ENVI-met version 4 was used to simulate the microclimate. The indices of Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) and Universal Temperature Climate Index (UTCI) were used to quantify the level of thermal comfort in the research areas. The simulation results showed that at midday, the difference in temperature between the garden area and the high-rise building area was approximately 1°C. Increasing temperatures at midday led to a change in the level of thermal comfort for both the areas, even though it was not significant. In general, the thermal perception in the GI area was slightly ‘cooler’ than in the high-rise building area. The results of the study indicated the important role of GI in...
Water
A rigorous evaluation of future hydro-climatic changes is necessary for developing climate adapta... more A rigorous evaluation of future hydro-climatic changes is necessary for developing climate adaptation strategies for a catchment. The integration of future climate projections from general circulation models (GCMs) in the simulations of a hydrologic model, such as the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), is widely considered as one of the most dependable approaches to assess the impacts of climate alteration on hydrology. The main objective of this study was to assess the potential impacts of climate alteration on the hydrology of the Yarra River catchment in Victoria, Australia, using the SWAT model. The climate projections from five GCMs under two Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios—RCP 4.5 and 8.5 for 2030 and 2050, respectively—were incorporated into the calibrated SWAT model for the analysis of future hydrologic behaviour against a baseline period of 1990–2008. The SWAT model performed well in its simulation of total streamflow, baseflow, and runoff, with Nas...
In the recent past, machine learning (ML) techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANN) hav... more In the recent past, machine learning (ML) techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANN) have been increasingly used to model algal bloom dynamics. In the present paper, along with ANN, we select genetic programming (GP) for modelling and prediction of algal blooms in Tolo Harbour, Hong Kong. The study of the weights of the trained ANN and also the GP-evolved equations shows that they correctly identify the ecologically significant variables. Analysis of various ANN and GP scenarios indicates that good predictions of long-term trends in algal biomass can be obtained using only chlorophyll-a as input. The results indicate that the use of biweekly data can simulate long-term trends of algal biomass reasonably well, but it is not ideally suited to give short-term algal bloom predictions.
Harmful algal blooms, which are considered a serious environmental problem nowadays, occur in coa... more Harmful algal blooms, which are considered a serious environmental problem nowadays, occur in coastal waters in many parts of the world. They cause acute ecological damage and ensuing economic losses, due to fish kills and shellfish poisoning as well as public health threats posed by toxic blooms. Recently, data-driven models including machine learning (ML) techniques have been employed to mimic dynamics of algal blooms. One of the most important steps in the application of a ML technique is the selection of significant model input variables. In the present paper, we use two extensively used ML techniques, artificial neural networks (ANN) and genetic programming (GP) for selecting the significant input variables. The efficacy of these techniques is first demonstrated on a test problem with known dependence and then they are applied to a real-world case study of water quality data from Tolo Harbour, Hong Kong. These ML techniques overcome some of the limitations of the currently used...
Sustainability
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our times, even before the onset of the Corona... more Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our times, even before the onset of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. One of the main contributors to climate change is greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which are mostly caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels. As the lockdown due to the pandemic has minimised human activity in major cities, GHG emissions have been reduced. This, in turn, is expected to lead to a reduction in the urban heat island (UHI) effect in the cities. The aim of this paper is to understand the relationship between human activity and the UHI intensity and to provide recommendations towards developing a sustainable approach to minimise the UHI effect and improve urban resilience. In this study, historical records of the monthly mean of daily maximum surface air temperatures collected from official weather stations in Melbourne, New York City, Tokyo, Dublin, and Oslo were used to estimate the UHI intensity in these cities. The results sh...
Sustainability
Universities and higher education institutions play an important role in achieving a sustainable ... more Universities and higher education institutions play an important role in achieving a sustainable future through their teaching and by undertaking cutting edge research to combat climate change. There have been several efforts towards a sustainable future and achieving carbon neutrality at higher education institutions in Australia and around the world. This study has reviewed the sustainability strategies of numerous universities in Australia and has identified as study cases six universities that are committed to and leading the implementation of initiatives to achieve carbon neutrality. The initiatives implemented at the selected universities were classified into eight “sustainability categories”, namely, built environment, energy, food and gardens, GHG emissions, natural environment, resource and waste management, transport, and water. Among the selected leading universities in sustainability, Charles Sturt University and the University of Tasmania (UTAS) are the only universitie...
Chan, F., Marinova, D. and Anderssen, R.S. (eds) MODSIM2011, 19th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation.
Chan, F., Marinova, D. and Anderssen, R.S. (eds) MODSIM2011, 19th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation.
Rainfall is the key climatic variable that governs the regional hydrologic cycle and availability... more Rainfall is the key climatic variable that governs the regional hydrologic cycle and availability of water resources. This study aims to perform a spatial analysis of rainfall patterns within the Yarra River catchment, which is a major source of water supply for Melbourne (in Victoria). Thus, any changes in rainfall patterns over this catchment would have implications for the management of water resources within the catchment. A detailed spatial analysis of rainfall patterns over the catchment using annual rainfall data from 64 rainfall stations shows that the rainfall patterns over the catchment can be divided into two rainfall regimes, one with average annual rainfall greater than the average of the entire catchment and the other being less than the average. The two rainfall regimes can be said to be reasonably consistent with the land use pattern, with the majority of the 'greater than average' rainfall stations being in forested areas, while the 'lower than average&#...
IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science
Over the past decade, zero waste emerged as one of the promising concepts for waste management. M... more Over the past decade, zero waste emerged as one of the promising concepts for waste management. Many parties have introduced this concept as a new way of waste management, aiming to reduce as little amount of waste generated as possible and send nothing to landfills. To measure the success of the zero waste implementation, some set of indicators have been developed. Although these were claimed to be successful after their implementation, very often they are not applicable to other regions or countries. Therefore, this study recommends developing the Zero Waste Management Index, which fits with local or regional conditions. This paper will discuss a framework for developing the West Java Zero Waste Management Index (WJZWMI). It will outline urban solid waste problem in West Java, and a brief review of existing zero waste indexes. Further, it will emphasize on the conceptual framework of the WJZWMI, which then results in potential long list indicators as preliminary results of this st...
Piantadosi, J., Anderssen, R.S. and Boland J. (eds) MODSIM2013, 20th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation
Future Internet
Urbanization is a challenge faced by most countries worldwide and leads to several problems. Due ... more Urbanization is a challenge faced by most countries worldwide and leads to several problems. Due to rapid communication capabilities, conforming the megacities into Ubiquitous cities (U-cities) seems to be a potential solution to mitigate the problems caused by urbanization. Extensive reliance and dependencies of U-cities on information and communication technologies (ICTs) bring forth a new set of risks and vulnerabilities to these megacities. This research investigates the vulnerabilities of ICTs against man-made and natural hazards in a systematic way using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The study identifies the vulnerabilities of different ICTs in U-cities and helps in improving the system’s resistivity against various hazards. The task is performed by evaluating the level of disruption on the different technologies and areas under the identified man-made and natural hazards. The research provides an insight into the working mechanisms of involved ICTs. It also helps to manage ...
Hydrology
Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is l... more Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is lately experiencing a growing risk of localized droughts due to inappropriate water resource management and climate change. Such a situation calls for much more efficient use and management of water in Bhutan. This paper undertakes an extensive analysis of the country’s water resources for better planning and management of the available water resources. Bhutan can be divided into three zones, the Southern Foothills, the Central Inner Himalayas, and the Higher Himalayas. The top four leading industries of Bhutan are related to water, either directly or indirectly. The country at present is at a very early stage of development. The government has prioritized water resources management over recent years. Water for hydropower in Bhutan has been in focus as compared to that allocated for irrigation, industries, and environmental demand. The demand for water in Bhutan has also increased in the ...
A key driver of Australia’s economic development is through promoting migration. A strong bottlen... more A key driver of Australia’s economic development is through promoting migration. A strong bottleneck to achieve the targets is a disproportional concentration of population in the metropolitan cities. To avoid congestion in these cities, emphasis is being given at the government level to promote the regional cities. With different city ranking systems, this study tries to identify linkage between the city ranking and people’s preference to live there. The proposed ranking system uses six components, namely, economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and governance. A comparison is done between the ranking systems by first assigning the same weightage to the six components and then assigning different weightages based on people’s preferences. This study considered 112 Australian cities, which were ranked by considering their performance based on the non-weighted and weighted parameters. Analytical Hierarchy Process is then used to assign the priorities/preferences of the compone...
Hydrology, 2021
Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is l... more Bhutan is a small yet water-abundant country. The country suffers from frequent flooding and is lately experiencing a growing risk of localized droughts due to inappropriate water resource management and climate change. Such a situation calls for much more efficient use and management of water in Bhutan. This paper undertakes an extensive analysis of the country’s water resources for better planning and management of the available water resources. Bhutan can be divided into three zones, the Southern Foothills, the Central Inner Himalayas, and the Higher Himalayas. The top four leading industries of Bhutan are related to water, either directly or indirectly. The country at present is at a very early stage of development. The government has prioritized water resources management over recent years. Water for hydropower in Bhutan has been in focus as compared to that allocated for irrigation, industries, and environmental demand. The demand for water in Bhutan has also increased in the ...
Spatial estimation of rainfall has many vital applications in water resources management of a bas... more Spatial estimation of rainfall has many vital applications in water resources management of a basin. Conventionally, stochastic methods such as kriging are widely used where the performance of the methods crucially depends on how the variogram model is constructed. In the recent past, attempts have been made to replace the traditional variogram models with universal function approximator based models such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN). In this study, a detailed investigation is done to assess the suitability of Genetic Programming (GP) based universal function approximator as a replacement for traditional variogram models and their performance is evaluated in estimating missing rainfall in two stations in Tamarabarani basin in Peninsular India. The study shows that GP based semi variogram seems to be a potential alternative to the conventional models. This model was further utilized to re-design the rain gauge network of the basin.
Water shortages and increasing urban densities are the main drivers that are challenging many dev... more Water shortages and increasing urban densities are the main drivers that are challenging many developed regions to consider alternative decentralized strategies such as rainwater harvesting, greywater re-use/recycling, sewer mining, urine separation and water demand management to control urban water services. The source management strategies which are implemented in residential area are likely to change sewage quality and quantity in sewer pipes since domestic sewage contributes 60% of the total sewage flows. Several past studies confirmed that the implementation of source management strategies successfully decrease the sewage flow and subsequently increase the sewage strength. Alteration of sewage quantity & quality can cause sewer problems such as blockage, corrosion and odour. An extensive literature study indicates that sewer problems associated with source management strategies can be qualitatively assessed. The results show that water demand management, sewer mining, greywater...
The problem of accurately determining river flows from rainfall, evaporation and other factors, o... more The problem of accurately determining river flows from rainfall, evaporation and other factors, occupies an important place in hydrology. The rainfall-runoff process is believed to be highly non-linear, time varying, spatially distributed and not easily described by simple models. Data-driven modelling approaches have been embraced enthusiastically by practitioners in water resources, as they are perceived to overcome some of the difficulties associated with physics based approaches. Such approaches have proved to be an effective and efficient way to model the rainfall-runoff process in situations where enough data on physical characteristics of catchment is not available or when it is essential to predict the flow in the shortest possible time to enable sufficient time for notification and evacuation procedures. Since, in the recent past, there has been an increasing interest to exploit the capability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in rainfall-runoff modelling, we analy...
Water resources management in Indonesia, particularly on the Island of Java, faces severe water p... more Water resources management in Indonesia, particularly on the Island of Java, faces severe water problems. In its annual report released in 2008, the National Planning and Development Council of Indonesia predicted that cities in Java Island would suffer critical water deficits in 2025, if the current excessive use of water resources continues. This excessive use was mainly caused by the sporadic groundwater extraction for various purposes, including agriculture, industry and household. In the West Java Province, the situation is even worse by the high level of pollution of rivers, in addition to excessive water use. In the past, to address these problems, the local government of West Java Province implemented some programs to manage the use of water resources, such as the enactment of new groundwater regulations and the campaign for clean river. However, these programs were not successful due to lack of awareness and support from various water resource stakeholders (Rahmat & Wangsaa...
This study assesses Human Thermal Comfort in two selected areas: a Green Infrastructure (GI) area... more This study assesses Human Thermal Comfort in two selected areas: a Green Infrastructure (GI) area represented by a garden and a high-rise building area, in the Central Business District (CBD) of Melbourne, Australia. Three-dimensional microclimatic modelling software, ENVI-met version 4 was used to simulate the microclimate. The indices of Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) and Universal Temperature Climate Index (UTCI) were used to quantify the level of thermal comfort in the research areas. The simulation results showed that at midday, the difference in temperature between the garden area and the high-rise building area was approximately 1°C. Increasing temperatures at midday led to a change in the level of thermal comfort for both the areas, even though it was not significant. In general, the thermal perception in the GI area was slightly ‘cooler’ than in the high-rise building area. The results of the study indicated the important role of GI in...