Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-324).

The following eight stories make up Out the Valley, a collection of short fiction. Each story stands independently as a single work, though together they are bound by ties to California's Central Valley. The places the characters inhabit range widely in socio-economic class systems, from the gang-ruled streets of Fresno in Beautiful, Smart, Talented, to upper middle class suburbia, looking back over one man's life in My Mary. Each character is dealing with their own set of deficiencies, so to speak. In Dominoes, Ross recalls his first love from prison. In Be Thou My Vision, a mother takes a trip to understand the life of her daughter in the wake of her murder. The Bare of Our Chests circles truth in a series of frames as the main character, Maynard, tries to confront the past while mourning his mother. A More Interesting Story shows Joni attempt to find freedom in her world of mental restrictions. In A Well Matched Man, Ephram's superficiality keeps him from finding and recognizing love. The title story, Deficiencies, follows a college-aged young man, Erol, as he learns to write despite dyslexia and the onslaught of obsessive love for his tutor. These are stories that the main characters wish they were not telling--events they cannot face in truth, and so view instead through their own flawed lenses.

Robust groundwater management is necessary to maintain long-term aquifer sustainability. Temporally and spatially inconsistent in situ data prevents robust groundwater resource evaluation. Data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission has been used to evaluate long-term, large-scale groundwater trends. However, the spatial resolution of GRACE data presents challenges for groundwater management in medium-sized aquifers like the Central Valley of California (CV). Other researchers have utilized GRACEderived data to evaluate groundwater storage in the CV, but they often make corrections due to what is referred to as the "leakage effect." We demonstrate a method for imputing gaps in groundwater time series that uses in situ data, Earth observations, and machine learning that provides an independent estimate of groundwater storage change. Using imputed data from this method, we calculate a storage depletion curve and use it to rescale GRACE-derived groundwater data in the CV. Our results demonstrate a method for calculating groundwater storage change, providing a direct solution for calibrating GRACE at a variety of aquifer scales.

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