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Joint probability methods for assessing storm surge flood risk involve the use of a collection of hydrodynamic storm simulations to fit a response surface model describing the functional relationship between storm surge and storm parameters like central pressure deficit and the radius of maximum wind speed. However, in areas with a sufficiently low probability of flooding, few storms in the simulated storm suite may produce surge, with most storms leaving the location dry with zero flooding. Analysts could treat these zero-depth, “non-wetting” storms as either truncated or censored data. If non-wetting storms are excluded from the training set used to fit the storm surge response surface, the resulting suite of wetting storms may have too few observations to produce a good fit; in the worst case, the model may no longer be identifiable. If non-wetting storms are censored using a constant value, this could skew the response surface fit. The problem is that non-wetting storms are indistinguishable, but some storms may have been closer to wetting than others for a given location. To address these issues, this thesis proposes the concept of a negative surge, or “pseudo-surge”, value with the intent to describe how close a storm came to causing surge at a location. Optimal pseudo-surge values are determined by their ability to improve the predictive performance of the response surface via minimization of a modified least squares error function. We compare flood depth exceedance estimates generated with and without pseudo-surge to determine the value of perfect information. Though not uniformly reducing flood depth exceedance estimate bias, pseudo-surge values do make improvements for some regions where <40% of simulated storms produced wetting. Furthermore, pseudo-surge values show potential to replace a post-processing heuristic implemented in the state-of-the-art response surface methodology that corrects flood depth exceedance estimates for locations where very few storms cause wetting.

<div> <div> <div> <p>Puerto Rico’s lack of effective and affordable energy substitutes after Hurricane Maria resulted in a mortality increase of 4,970 residents (Verma, Murray, and Mamdani, 2018). Puerto Rico’s Island dependency on electric power and no energy substitutes available have provoked a risk to human life after catastrophic events. The problem was measured by comparing Puerto Rico’s reliance on fossil fuels with accessible and economical renewable energy options. Solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies are the optimum alternative to transition from fossil fuel usage to renewable energy. Previous research has demonstrated the impact of using solar panels instead of an electric grid due to the constant solar radiation throughout the year. The analyzed data and projections showed a reduction in fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions by implementing solar photovoltaic technologies. The installation of PV systems in landfills, household roofs and transitioning to solar public lighting positively impacts the atmosphere carbon dioxide emissions. </p> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Silver carp (<i>Hypophthalmichthys molitrix</i>)<b> </b>are an underutilized, invasive fish threatening native species throughout major water systems in the United States. The goal of this research was to use silver carp meat to create a value-added product, to analyze the changes in physicochemical structure and consumer liking over time, and to evaluate the benefits of adding soy, pea, and a combination of soy and pea protein isolates to the formulations. Fish nuggets were prepared from minced meat in four treatments consisting of 3% soy protein isolate (SPI), 3% pea protein isolate (PPI), a combination of 1.5% SPI and 1.5% PPI, and a control without plant protein isolate. Nuggets from each treatment were stored frozen for 1.5, 8.5, and 13.5 weeks. Proximate composition, pH, cook loss, textural hardness, expressible moisture, color, microbial counts and lipid oxidation were evaluated. Sensory acceptability was also evaluated for each frozen storage time period and treatment. A descriptive (QDA^™) trained sensory panel was also conducted on all treatments independent of the storage testing. Results showed that lipid oxidation and textural hardness significantly (P < 0.05) increased with frozen storage time. PPI had significantly lower expressible moisture compared to the control at week 1.5, but there were no statistically significant differences between treatments at weeks 8.5 and 13.5. Similarly, formulations with PPI improved (p<0.05) cook loss for week 1.5, but not week 8.5 or 13.5. Overall, sensory acceptability did not change (P > 0.05), with the exception of decreased degree of liking scores for SPI aroma (p=0.03) and flavor (p=0.03)) during the frozen storage period; all degree of liking scores remained above 6.5 throughout analysis, indicating that consumers’ acceptability of the sample treatments over time despite the changes in physicochemical structure. The descriptive panel created an attribute lexicon for the aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel of the fish nuggets and did not find significant differences in intensities for those attributes between the treatments. Although there were measurable changes in oxidation, texture, expressible moisture, and cook loss over 13.5 weeks, these changes did not impact sensory acceptance. The addition of protein isolates improved water holding capacity initially but did not maintain those benefits over extended shelf life and had little impact on consumer liking during any time period. Overall, this study demonstrated that value-added products such as silver carp nuggets can be created using an otherwise under-utilized fish. The fish nuggets had high sensory acceptability, and the addition of protein isolates did not significantly improve their sensory characteristics; therefore, silver carp nuggets can be formulated without the need of additional protein additives .</p>