BACKGROUND This study seeks to quantify variation in healthcare utilization and per capita costs using system-defined geographic regions based on enrollee residence within the Military Health System (MHS). METHODS Data for fiscal years 2007 - 2010 were obtained from the Military Health System under a data sharing agreement with the Defense Health Agency (DHA). DHA manages all aspects of the D...

Demand-side energy management systems (EMSs) are expected to be used as a method for further balancing the supply and demand of power systems with high levels of renewable energy generation, such as photovoltaic (PV) power. Energy demand and solar radiation must be predicted to realize the optimal operation scheduling of demand-side appliances by a home energy management system (HEMS), includin...

A multi-year, multi-technique study was conducted to measure evapotranspiration and its components within an uneven-aged mixed deciduous forest in the Southeastern United States. Four different measurement techniques were used, including soil water budget (1 year), sap flow (2 years), eddy covariance (5 years), and catchment water budget (31 years). Annual estimates of evapotranspiration were s...

Land use changes are altering the hydrologic system and have potentially large impacts on water resources. Rapid socio-economic development drives land use change. This is particularly true in the case of the rapidly developing city of Pune, India. The present study aims at analyzing past land use changes between 1989 and 2009 and their impacts on the water balance in the Mula and Mutha Rivers ...

Finland has committed to both increasing timber production and decreasing the nutrient loading caused by forestry, which calls for development of methods to assess environmental impacts of forest management. A simulation model based on the concept of a typical hillslope is applied to describe water and nitrogen processes in a forested catchment. Application of the model requires that spatially ...

Salinisation is a major environmental problem affecting land and water systems in Australia. This paper outlines a study currently being undertaken to provide a new tool to manage salinity from environmental and socioeconomic perspectives. In this study, biophysical and socio-economic aspects of the Little River Catchment and their relevance to salinity management will be investigated using a B...

[1] Sediment fans are a potentially useful and underexploited recorder of Earth’s climatic and tectonic history, but historical observations have led to conflicting views on the importance of tectonic, climatic, and lithologic variables in controlling fan morphology and deposition. A one-dimensional model of a sediment fan and its associated catchment is used to explore the sensitivity of such ...

We study the regularity of solutions of the obstacle problem when the obstacle is smooth on each half of the unit ball but only Lipschitz across the shared boundary. We prove that the optimal regularity of these solutions is C 1 2 up to the shared boundary on each half of the unit ball. The proof uses a modification of Almgren’s frequency formula.

The objective of this study is to explore an optimal strategy on energy consumption for a direct expansion (DX) air-conditioning system by using a refrigerant pump in the liquid line to allow the system to operate at a lower condensing pressure. An existing DX rooftop package of a commercial building located in a hot and dry climate zone is used for data collection. The theoretical-empirical mo...