Developments in science and engineering are based on work that has been carried out in the past. Every researcher and practitioner bases their work on what has been carried out in the past. Future advances rely on past work. Journals, such as Water Management, play a vital role in quickly making available work that is being carried out all over the world. For the system to function it is important that the readers of such journals should have confidence in the content of papers and the origin of the work that is published. Without this confidence the system of publishing journals would descend into chaos, progress would stall and the future development of our subject would be threatened.
Recently a paper was submitted to this journal which was substantially copied from another published paper. To disguise this act of copying, the alleged location of the study had been transferred from one country to another. Thus the submitted paper misrepresented both the scientific content of the paper and the attribution of the work to a particular researcher. Such actions undermine the whole basis of scientific journal publication and threaten the future advance of our discipline. This journal has a published policy concerning plagiarism, which is followed when any such case is suspected. We are committed to taking the strongest possible actions to protect the interests of our readers and the community at large.
The range of papers in the present issue reflects the diverse nature of the discipline of water management. The first paper by Xia et al. (2011), concerns modelling the risk associated with flash floods in urban areas. The work goes beyond just the modelling of flood flows by using the modelling results to assess the flood risk to people on the basis of the predicted flow velocities and depths. The model is tested against data from the Boscastle flood of 2004. Perhaps inspired by the conditions in that flood, the risk of movement of cars is included in the risk assessment. The paper adds to the work of Hunter et al. (2008) and Wang et al. (2010) by showing the value of numerical flood modelling in urban areas.
The issue of the afflux generated at bridges is important for both bridge design and also for modelling water levels in rivers and the paper by Seckin et al. (2011) makes an important contribution to this topic. In the past the approach to the estimation of bridge afflux has been based on the application of the dynamic equations for fluid flow. The authors of this paper however use methods developed in artificial intelligence (AI). The use of such methods is growing in water resources (see Tang et al., 2010) as they often provide better estimates of variables than more traditional approaches. The study by Seckin et al. identifies the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system as providing an approach to bridge afflux that is superior to other AI methods and to the more conventional energy approach. This same approach has also been successfully applied to the prediction of scour at bridge piers (Firat, 2009). The challenge for the future is surely how to combine the advantages of both conventional approaches and AI methods.
The calculation of flow in spatially varying channels still presents many problems. Although the equations describing such flow have been known for many years there are still cases for which the derivation of the appropriate solution is difficult. The paper by Bijankhan and Darvishi (2011) considers the problem of choking in channels with horseshoe cross-sections. Choking problems may arise at channel transitions. For complex channel cross-section shapes such as a horseshoe shape the currently available methods involve complex iterative techniques. Bijankhan and Darvishi present a straightforward solution which is simple to apply. The work can be seen as complementing earlier papers by Vatankhah (2010) and Vatankhah and Bijankhan (2010) which develop simple techniques for considering choking in trapezoidal, circular and ovoidal-shaped channels.
Block ramps or rock chutes can be used as part of river rehabilitation schemes or as part of engineering schemes to allow the migration upstream and downstream of a structure. An important feature of the design of such structures is the stability of the rocks forming the ramp. Pagliara and Palermo (2011) describe an experimental study of the stability of such rock ramps. A novelty in the paper is that the authors consider different failure phases: incipient motion, local failure, global failure and ultimate failure. This provides scope for a designer to consider a range of design conditions and to investigate the impact of flood events greater than the design event.
Leakage from piped water distribution systems still represents a significant percentage of the total water delivered and so detecting leakage in pipe systems is a major challenge for those responsible for such systems. The flow properties in pipe systems are affected by leaks and so it has long been known that the analysis of transients within the system can be used in leak detection (inverse transient analysis). Haghighi and Shamloo (2011) describe an approach to optimise the transient generation to be used. Their work should lead to more efficient applications of inverse transient analysis for leak detection.
I would like to end on a personal note. My time as Chairman of the Editorial Panel will come to an end later this year. I would like to thank the many people who have helped and supported me and the work of the journal during this time. Particular thanks must go to the staff of ICE Publishing and the members of the Editorial Panel. I am confident that Water Management will go from strength to strength in the future.
