Water-deficit-based drought risk assessments in Taiwan

Taiwan is located in Western Pacific and receives approximate 2,500?mm rainfall per year. Suffered from inadequate water supply during prolonged and severe droughts, assessing drought risk becomes one of the key tasks of water-resources planning and management in Taiwan. Well-prepared drought mitigation measures require assimilation of physical environment of droughts and human socioeconomic factors. An index-based approach is presented in this study to evaluate drought risk at municipal scale in Taiwan for current status (2008) as well as future scenarios (2021). A multiplicative formula links drought hazard (frequency, duration, and severity of droughts), drought exposure (water use), and drought vulnerability (unreliable water supply) to determine drought risk. This approach quantifies the spatial distribution of drought risk and is able to deal with future changes of water use and water-supply source and to examine their influences on drought risk assessments. The results reveal that the regions that are at great risk in the future are those regions already threaten by drought currently. Changes of future water use and water-supply source would not significantly alter spatial distribution of drought risk and ranking order among regions. These results present a basis for future water-resources planning and economic developments for each municipal region.     

Stability Charts for Closely Spaced Strip Footings on Hoek–Brown Rock Mass

Geotechnical and Geological Engineering - Footings are constructed closely to each other in mountainous rock areas and the determination of closely spaced bearing capacity footings on rock masses...     

New evidence for a glacioeustatic influence on deep water circulation, bottom water ventilation and primary productivity in the South China Sea

We provide new evidence for the development of a stable estuarine circulation characterized by stagnating water bodies, nutrient recycling and increased primary productivity in the South China Sea (SCS) during glacial intervals. This circulation was caused by the closure of the shallow and narrow straits connecting the SCS in the south and west. Our main evidence is derived from newly measured Mn concentrations and Mn/Al ratios in two sediment cores from the northern and southeastern SCS covering the last 500 ky. Concentrations and Mn/Al ratios of the redox sensitive element Mn show clear glacial–interglacial cycles with maxima during interglacial periods and minima during glacial periods. These cycles indicate ventilation cycles of the bottom water, and are connected to the glacial–interglacial changes in sea level. In contrast, total organic carbon (TOC) concentrations display an opposite pattern with pronounced maxima during glacial times, especially in the southern part of the basin. The variations in TOC can be ascribed to two factors. Firstly, variations in primary productivity are controlled by variations in the intensity of the winter monsoon. Secondly to the degree of preservation of TOC controlled by variations in ventilation, which in turn is ultimately controlled by sea level. Consequently, variations in TOC represent a superimposition of primarily sea level influenced preservation control and winter monsoon driven variations in primary productivity intensity. The decrease in Mn correspond to times when sea level dropped 40–60 m below the present level. The larger amplitude of the variations in TOC and Mn in the southern part of the basin compared to the northern site suggest that oxygen depletion and nutrient recycling was stronger in the parts of the basin situated the furthest away from the only remaining opening to the open Pacific, the Luzon Strait.     

Increased precipitation during the Little Ice Age in northern Taiwan inferred from diatoms and geochemistry in a sediment core from a subalpine lake

We studied diatoms in a 55.5-cm-long sediment core from a subalpine lake in northern Taiwan, Tsuifong Lake (TFL), to investigate environmental changes from AD 490 to present. Diatom assemblages of the last century were dominated by acidophilous species, whereas alkaliphilous taxa dominated the record between AD 1480 and 1910. Over the studied time frame, four decadal periods with high precipitation were inferred from evidence of elevated soil input from the watershed, supported by the stable isotope signatures (δ¹⁵N, δ¹³C) of organic matter and magnetic susceptibility of the sediments. We compared the inferred changes in pH of TFL to values obtained from three other Taiwanese subalpine lakes. The present study revealed that elevated precipitation was associated with increased solar irradiance over the last five centuries, with a stable dry period between AD 490 and 1450. Acidification of TFL in the last ~100 years was a consequence of deforestation and acid rain.     

Spatial hydrological drought characteristics in Karkheh River basin,southwest Iran using copulas

Investigation on drought characteristics such as severity, duration, and frequency is crucial for water resources planning and management in a river basin. While the methodology for multivariate drought frequency analysis is well established by applying the copulas, the estimation on the associated parameters by various parameter estimation methods and the effects on the obtained results have not yet been investigated. This research aims at conducting a comparative analysis between the maximum likelihood parametric and non-parametric method of the Kendall \(\tau \) estimation method for copulas parameter estimation. The methods were employed to study joint severity–duration probability and recurrence intervals in Karkheh River basin (southwest Iran) which is facing severe water-deficit problems. Daily streamflow data at three hydrological gauging stations (Tang Sazbon, Huleilan and Polchehr) near the Karkheh dam were used to draw flow duration curves (FDC) of these three stations. The \(Q_{75}\) index extracted from the FDC were set as threshold level to abstract drought characteristics such as drought duration and severity on the basis of the run theory. Drought duration and severity were separately modeled using the univariate probabilistic distributions and gamma–GEV, LN2–exponential, and LN2–gamma were selected as the best paired drought severity–duration inputs for copulas according to the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC), Kolmogorov–Smirnov and chi-square tests. Archimedean Clayton, Frank, and extreme value Gumbel copulas were employed to construct joint cumulative distribution functions (JCDF) of droughts for each station. Frank copula at Tang Sazbon and Gumbel at Huleilan and Polchehr stations were identified as the best copulas based on the performance evaluation criteria including AIC, BIC, log-likelihood and root mean square error (RMSE) values. Based on the RMSE values, nonparametric Kendall-\(\tau \) is preferred to the parametric maximum likelihood estimation method. The results showed greater drought return periods by the parametric ML method in comparison to the nonparametric Kendall \(\tau \) estimation method. The results also showed that stations located in tributaries (Huleilan and Polchehr) have close return periods, while the station along the main river (Tang Sazbon) has the smaller return periods for the drought events with identical drought duration and severity.     

Three-dimensional sinkhole stability of spherical cavity

Acta Geotechnica - Sinkhole occurrences due to underground water mains operations have piqued people’s curiosity. Most research works were in relation to geophysical practices to discover the...     

Assessment of hydrological droughts for the Yellow River,China, using copulas

Droughts are one of the normal and recurrent climatic phenomena on Earth. However, recurring prolonged droughts have caused far‐reaching and diverse impacts because of water deficits. This study aims to investigate the hydrological droughts of the Yellow River in northern China. Since drought duration and drought severity exhibit significant correlation, a bivariate distribution is used to model the drought duration and severity jointly. However, drought duration and drought severity are often modelled by different distributions; the commonly used bivariate distributions cannot be applied. In this study, a copula is employed to construct the bivariate drought distribution. The copula is a function that links the univariate marginal distributions to form the bivariate distribution. The bivariate return periods are also established to explore the drought characteristics of the historically noticeable droughts. The results show that the return period of the drought that occurred in late 1920s to early 1930s is 105 years. The significant 1997 dry‐up phenomenon that occurred in the downstream Yellow River (resulting from the 1997–1998 drought) only has a return period of 4·4 years and is probably induced by two successive droughts and deteriorated by other factors, such as human activities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sloped multi‐roller isolation devices for seismic protection of equipment and facilities

The rolling motion of mutually orthogonal rollers respectively sandwiched between two bearing plates in which one or both have V‐shaped sloping surfaces makes the sloped rolling‐type isolation device have an excellent in‐plane seismic isolation performance. In this study, the sloped rolling type isolation device in which a single roller moves between two V‐shaped sloping surfaces along each principle horizontal direction is refined by incorporating multi‐roller, built‐in damping, and pounding prevention mechanisms. The associated dynamic behavior is further clarified, and a simplified twin‐flag hysteretic model, which can be easily applied in most commercial computational tools is then proposed. Seismic simulation tests on the refined isolation devices (i.e. the sloped multi‐roller isolation devices) with different design parameters such as sloping angles of bearing plates and built‐in damping capabilities, together with a raised floor system by employing the sloped multi‐roller isolation devices, were conducted. Not only is the efficiency of the sloped multi‐roller isolation devices in seismically protecting the important objects, but also the practicability and accuracy of the proposed simplified numerical model in predicting the seismic responses of the sloped multi‐roller isolation devices is experimentally verified. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.