Temperature Trends and Changes in Rize,Turkey, for the Period 1975 to 2007

There is increasing evidence that the global climate is changing as a result of anthropogenic activity. Short‐term mean, maximum, and minimum temperatures of the city Rize located at the Eastern Black Sea Coast of Turkey were analyzed to reveal trends, change points, significant warming (cooling) periods, and trend rates per year. An increasing trend of approximately 1.27°C/33 years (α = 0.001) in the annual mean temperatures is found during the period from 1975 to 2007. Two periods, averaging 13.78 and 14.66°C, respectively, were detected from fluctuation in the annual mean temperatures. The trend of the first period (1975–1993) is towards a cooler climate, whereas the trend of the second period (1994–2007) is towards a warmer climate. Summer, autumn and, particularly, the spring mean temperatures have tended to increase strongly, whereas the winter mean temperatures have increased slightly over the whole period. For the winter mean temperature, the trend rate indicates a slight increase, which is insignificant. Maximum temperatures have dramatically increased with 1.61°C (α = 0.001) over the last 33 years. However, annual minimum temperatures have increased by 0.99°C (α = 0.01) over the same period.     

Sensitivity of the active fracture model parameter to fracture network orientation and injection scenarios

Active fractures refer to the portions of unsaturated, connected fractures that actively conduct water. The active fracture model parameter accounts for the reduction in the number of fractures carrying water and in the fracture–matrix interface area in field-scale simulations of flow and transport in unsaturated fractured rocks. One example includes the numerical analyses of the fault test results at the Yucca Mountain site, Nevada (USA). In such applications, the active fracture model parameter is commonly used as a calibration parameter without relating it to fracture network orientations and infiltration rates. A two-dimensional, multiphase lattice-Boltzmann model was used in this study to investigate the sensitivity of the active fracture model parameter to fracture network orientation and injection scenarios for an unsaturated, variable dipping, and geometrically simple fracture network. The active fracture model parameter differed by as much as 0.11–0.44 when the effects of fracture network orientation, injection rate, and injection mode were included in the simulations. Hence, the numerical results suggest that the sensitivity of the active fracture model parameter to fracture network orientation, injection rates, and injection modes should be explored at the field-scale to strengthen the technical basis and range of applicability of the active fracture model.     

Effect of salt crystallization on weathering of pyroclastic rocks from Cappadocia,Turkey

Salt crystallization is the most significant factor in the degradation of the natural stones used in cultural and historical structures. Stones decay partially or fully as a result of this exposure. This study is the investigation of the degradation of historical monuments (underground cities and semi-underground settlements) carved in pyroclastic rocks in Cappadocian Region which takes part in World Cultural Heritage List. Samples of pyroclastic rocks were collected from six different quarries in Cappadocia, Turkey. To understand the contribution of salt crystallization to this weathering, dry weight loss (DWL) tests were performed on these samples. To investigate the correlations between salt crystallization and other rock properties, porosity, water absorption, ultrasonic velocity, uniaxial compressive strength, Brazilian tensile strength, and point load index were also measured. During the SC process of weathering, the results showed that porosity and water absorption increased for all the samples whereas ultrasonic velocity, uniaxial compressive strength, tensile strength, and point load index values decreased. Evaluation of the data obtained from these tests showed very high logarithmic correlations between the dry weight loss values and the mechanical properties.     

In situ gamma ray measurements for deciphering of radioactivity level in Sarıhan pluton area of northeastern Turkey

The present work utilizes in situ gamma ray spectrometric measurement data to map the surface geology of Sar?han Granitoid and its surrounding area. The study area comprises three different lithological units, namely, Hozbirikyayla Formation (limestone and sandy limestones), Sar?han Granitoid (consist of quartz monzodiorite, granodiorite and quartz diorite) and the Ophiolitic olistostromal melange (andesite, basalt, sandstone, gravelly sandstone). When lithological units are assessed according to the radioactivity characteristics, natural radionuclide contents (⁴⁰K and radionuclides from ²³⁸U and ²³²Th series) of Hozbirikyayla limestones and ophiolitic melange rocks are lower than the Sar?han pluton. The U, Th and K radionuclide contents were found to be 0.8–5.4 ppm, 10.1–33.6 ppm and 1.29–4.41% in the Sar?han plutonic area and 0.9–5.3 ppm, 1.1–20.3 ppm and 0.04–2.71% in Horzbirikyayla formation, respectively. The element concentrations of ²³⁸U, ²³²Th and ⁴⁰K of the Ophiolitic melange are 1.1–4.5 ppm, 1.6–25.3 ppm and 0.09–3.63%, respectively. Radioelement ratio maps are created for the studied area, because the parameters of radioelement ratios, eU/eTh, eU/K and eTh/K, reflect the radioactive characters of the rock and soil. The Hozbirikyayla Formation is characterized by the highest value of eU/eTh and lowest value of eTh/K. While the lowest eU/eTh and eU/K ratios were observed in the Sar?han Granodiorite, the highest value of eU/K and eTh/K were obtained in the Ophiolitic olistostromal melange. By comparing these maps with the geology, it was found that the radioelement concentrations are in good agreement with the geological properties of the region. In addition to this, the radiation hazard parameters were evaluated to assess the radiation hazard for people living in this area. It has also been found that there is no significant radiologic hazard for humans and the environment in and around studied area.     

Assessment of geo-environmental properties depressing urban development with GIS: a case study of Kozlu settlement,Turkey

Kozlu is a mining town only 5 km away from the main city of Zonguldak and initially was not favored for settlement due to its rugged and hilly topography. However, along with hard coal production in large quantities throughout the years came the industrialization at its full speed with plenty job opportunities which then gave rise to intense population in the region where there were only a few sheds and slums just a century ago. Workers migrating to Kozlu in thousands needed dwellings to live in, but the law, so-called the Coal Basin Restrictions Law which came in effect in 1910, hindered the implementation of zoning plans. Planned housing was not possible in the region not until the abolishment of the law in 1986. During these 76 years, the settlement in the area mostly by the mining and industry workers was carried out without proper zoning plans, usually on demand basis. Today because of this unplanned housing and harsh topography, the Kozlu settlement area (KSA) has a history of being attraction point for many natural and man-made disasters which can be summarized as are topography, geological and carstic structure, mining activities and mass movements. In this study, a settlement suitability map is produced for the study area using a geographic information system. The map produced is designated into four settlement suitability zones, namely suitable to settlement, slightly suitable to settlement, suitable to settlement with precautions and unsuitable to settlement. It clearly shows that 24.73% of the study area lies in suitable and slightly suitable to settlement areas while the bulky rest pertains to suitable to settlement with precautions and unsuitable to settlement. The latest studies show that the 37.5% of the buildings and houses in the KSA are situated on the lithologic units identified as hydrogeological permeable and semipermeable, 7.8% on carstic caverns and a hefty rate of 47.6% on the surfaces deformed by mining-induced subsidence. Therefore, it is needless to claim that the administrators of Kozlu should promptly develop a settlement plan for the welfare of the city.     

Further improvement of temporal resolution of seismic data by autoregressive (AR) spectral extrapolation

Seismic data have still no enough temporal resolution because of band-limited nature of available data even if it is deconvolved. However, lower and higher frequency information belonging to seismic data is missing and it is not directly recovered from seismic data. In this paper, a method originally applied by Honarvar et al. [Honarvar, F., Sheikhzadeh, H., Moles, M., Sinclair, A.N., 2004. Improving the time-resolution and signal–noise ratio of ultrasonic NDE signals. Ultrasonics 41, 755–763.] which is the combination of the most widely used Wiener deconvolution and AR spectral extrapolation in frequency domain is briefly reviewed and is applied to seismic data to improve temporal resolution further. The missing frequency information is optimally recovered by forward and backward extrapolation based on the selection of a high signal–noise ratio (SNR) of signal spectrum deconvolved in signal processing technique. The combination of the two methods is firstly tested on a variety of synthetic examples and then applied to a stacked real trace. The selection of necessary parameters in Wiener filtering and in extrapolation are discussed in detail. It is used an optimum frequency windows between 3 and 10 dB drops by comparing results from these drops, while frequency windows are used as standard between 2.8 and 3.2 dB drops in study of Honarvar et al. [Honarvar, F., Sheikhzadeh, H., Moles, M., Sinclair, A.N., 2004. Improving the time-resolution and signal–noise ratio of ultrasonic NDE signals. Ultrasonics 41, 755–763.]. The results obtained show that the application of the purposed signal processing technique considerably improves temporal resolution of seismic data when compared with the original seismic data. Furthermore, AR based spectral extrapolated data can be almost considered as reflectivity sequence of layered medium. Consequently, the combination of Wiener deconvolution and AR spectral extrapolation can reveal some details of seismic data that cannot be observed in raw signal or which lost during the previous processing.     

Isotopic and molecular composition of coal-bed gas in the Amasra region (Zonguldak basin—western Black Sea)

Previous studies on the coal-bed methane potential of the Zonguldak basin have indicated that the gases are thermogenic and sourced by the coal-bearing Carboniferous units. In this earlier work, the origin of coal-bed gas was only defined according to the molecular composition of gases and to organic geochemical properties of the respective source rocks, since data on isotopic composition of gases were not available. Furthermore, in the western Black Sea region there also exist other source rocks, which may have contributed to the coal-bed gas accumulations. The aim of this study is to determine the origin of coal-bed gas and to try a gas-source rock correlation. For this purpose, the molecular and isotopic compositions of 13 headspace gases from coals and adjacent sediments of two wells in the Amasra region have been analyzed. Total organic carbon (TOC) measurements and Rock-Eval pyrolysis were performed in order to characterize the respective source rocks. Coals and sediments are bearing humic type organic matter, which have hydrogen indices (HI) of up to 300 mgHC/gTOC, indicating a certain content of liptinitic material. The stable carbon isotope ratios (δ¹³C) of the kerogen vary from −23.1 to −27.7‰. Air-free calculated gases contain hydrocarbons up to C₅, carbon dioxide (<1%) and a considerable amount of nitrogen (up to 38%). The gaseous hydrocarbons are dominated by methane (>98%). The stable carbon isotope ratios of methane, ethane and propane are defined as δ¹³C₁: −51.1 to −48.3‰, δ¹³C₂: −37.9 to −25.3‰, δ¹³C₃: −26.0 to −19.2 ‰, respectively. The δD₁ values of methane range from −190 to −178‰. According to its isotopic composition, methane is a mixture, partly generated bacterially, partly thermogenic. Molecular and isotopic composition of the gases and organic geochemical properties of possible source rocks indicate that the thermogenic gas generation took place in coals and organic rich shales of the Westphalian-A Kozlu formation. The bacterial input can be related to a primary bacterial methane generation during Carboniferous and/or to a recent secondary bacterial methane generation. However, some peculiarities of respective isotope values of headspace gases can also be related to the desorption process, which took place by sampling.     

Comparison of local and global approximators in multivariate chaotic forecasting of daily streamflow

ABSTRACT

Although it is conceptually assumed that global models are relatively ineffective in modelling the highly unstable structure of chaotic hydrologic dynamics, there is not a detailed study of comparing the performances of local and global models in a hydrological context, especially with new emerging machine learning models. In this study, the performance of a local model (k-nearest neighbour, k-nn) and, as global models, several recent machine learning models – artificial neural network (ANN), least square-support vector regression (LS-SVR), random forest (RF), M5 model tree (M5), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) – was analysed in multivariate chaotic forecasting of streamflow. The models were developed for Australia’s largest river, the River Murray. The results indicate that the k-nn model was more successful than the global models in capturing the streamflow dynamics. Furthermore, coupled with the multivariate phase-space, it was shown that the global models can be successfully used for obtaining reliable uncertainty estimates for streamflow.     

Prediction of ground vibrations resulting from the blasting operations in an open-pit mine by adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system

The aim of this study is to predict the peak particle velocity (PPV) values from both presently constructed simple regression model and fuzzy-based model. For this purpose, vibrations induced by bench blasting operations were measured in an open-pit mine operated by the most important magnesite producing company (MAS) in Turkey. After gathering the ordered pairs of distance and PPV values, the site-specific parameters were determined using traditional regression method. Also, an attempt has been made to investigate the applicability of a relatively new soft computing method called as the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to predict PPV. To achieve this objective, data obtained from the blasting measurements were evaluated by constructing an ANFIS-based prediction model. The distance from the blasting site to the monitoring stations and the charge weight per delay were selected as the input parameters of the constructed model, the output parameter being the PPV. Valid for the site, the PPV prediction capability of the constructed ANFIS-based model has proved to be successful in terms of statistical performance indices such as variance account for (VAF), root mean square error (RMSE), standard error of estimation, and correlation between predicted and measured PPV values. Also, using these statistical performance indices, a prediction performance comparison has been made between the presently constructed ANFIS-based model and the classical regression-based prediction method, which has been widely used in the literature. Although the prediction performance of the regression-based model was high, the comparison has indicated that the proposed ANFIS-based model exhibited better prediction performance than the classical regression-based model.