Previous studies on multiyear droughts have often been limited to the analysis of historic annual flow series. A major disadvantage in this approach can be described as the unavailability of long historic flow records needed to obtain a significant number of drought events for the analysis. To overcome this difficulty, the present study proposes to use synthetically generated annual flow series. A methodology is presented to model annual flows based on an analysis of the harmonic and stochastic properties of the observed flows. Once the model is determined, it can be utilized to generate a flow series of desired length so as to include many hydrologic cycles within the process. The key parameter for a successful drought study is the truncation level used to distinguish low flows from high flows. In this paper, a concept of selecting the truncation level is also presented. The drought simulation procedure is illustrated by a case study of the Pequest watershed in New Jersey. For the above watershed, multiyear droughts were derived from both historic and generated flow series. Three important drought parameters, namely, the duration, severity, and magnitude, were determined for each drought event, and their probability distributions were studied. It was found that gamma and log normal probaility functions produce the best fit for the duration and severity, respectively. The derived probability curves from generated flows can be reliably used to predict the longest drought duration and the largest drought severity within a given return period.

No abstract

This paper presents a means for obtaining both the stress and displacement states which appear in thick, circular, cylindrical shells under arbitrary load and boundary conditions. The governing differential equations and the associated boundary conditions are obtained by utilizing Reissner’s variational principle [6], the assumed form of the stress state containing, in addition to terms corresponding to conventional membrane and bending stress resultants, supplementary sets of self-equilibrating stress resultants. Comparison of results obtained from known elasticity solutions shows that the present theory accurately yields solutions for shells with radius-thickness ratios of the order of 3.0. Numerically computed here, for comparison purposes, is the axisymmetric, periodically spaced, band load problem of Klosner and Levine.

No abstract

No abstract