Khulna is the third largest metropolitan city in Bangladesh and a centre with intensive commercial and industrial activities. Rapid urbanization and increased migration of people from rural and coastal areas has put tremendous pressure on its existing solid waste management. The status of the existing municipal solid waste (MSW) management tiers such as generation, source storage, collection, on-site storage, transportation, and open dumping has been identified in this study. The daily generation of MSW is estimated as 520 Mg, of which food and vegetable wastes are the main components (79% on average). The major source of generated MSW is residential areas, which is 85.87% of total generation, whereas 11.60% in commercial areas, 1.02% in institutional areas, 0.55% in street sweeps and 0.96% in other areas. About 50% of total generated waste is disposed daily to the dumping site and the rest remains uncollected and unmanaged. Non-governmental organizations and community based organizations play an important role in primary collection, composting of organic wastes and medical waste management.

A water reservoir's operation should follow a rational policy to ensure adequate water provision for different purposes without adverse effects. However, it is not well-studied how to identify operational policies currently being implemented. This study establishes a new approach to identifying nominal release policies as implemented in a multi-purpose water reservoir. We chose Bukit Merah Reservoir (BMR), located in Perak State, Malaysia, as a study site to examine its release policies for meeting irrigation, municipal, and industrial water demands and for mitigating floods and environmental hazards. The operator of BMR releases the reservoir's water into two primary irrigation canals, the Main Canal and the Selinsing Canal. Generalized additive models (GAMs) are applied to time series data observed at BMR to identify the annual dynamics of its water management. Operational policies for the release discharges into the two primary irrigation canals are assumed to be based on information on the time-of-year and the reservoir water level. First, a backfitting algorithm identifies each contributing function of the GAMs representing the release policies. Then, spurious oscillations in the functions are removed by total variation (TV) regularization (TVR) to obtain nominal release policies, which are quite reasonable in the sense of conventional reservoir management practice. Finally, the identified nominal release policies are utilized to examine shifts in the operation of BMR during the period from 2000 through 2011. The decomposition of release policies illustrates the two aspects of the irrigation demand's annual patterns and the hydraulic structures' functions. The spurious oscillations removed by TVR are considered to represent indecision by the reservoir operator.

Minimizing discrepancies between observed and predicted data series is one of the central topics of hydrological process modelling. There are two contrasting approaches of hydrological models: deterministic and stochastic. This paper discusses the controversy over deterministic models, mainly applied to practical problems. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) distributed watershed model hypothesizes the correctness of its model structure representing deterministic physical phenomena. SWAT coupled with Sequential Uncertainty Fitting 2 (SUFI-2) calibration and uncertainty tool, programmed in SWAT Calibration and Uncertainty Procedures (SWAT-CUP). In contrast, one of the stochastic models, is autoregressive with exogenous input (ARX) model with linear Markovian input-output relationship between rainfall and streamflow. Malaysia's Kurau River Basin (KRB) is chosen as a study of predicting streamflow through both mentioned models. Common statistical indicators, coefficient of determination (R 2 ), Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE), and Percent Bias (PBIAS), are used for assessing the performance of both models. The outcomes of the sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of parameters using SWAT with SUFI-2 indicate that baseflow and percolation are notified as essential components for total discharge. However, the SWAT-CUP parameters designed for the environment of the North American continent are not suited for all regions. It can be observed that the SWAT model is deficient in capturing the baseflow due to the limitation of its ability to represent groundwater flows rigorously. Furthermore, the SWAT model needs modification to adapt to the peculiar hydrological environment of KRB. The impact of artificial viscosity on flattening and filtering peaks of the streamflow also needs evaluation.