Sea breeze activity at an inland station Kharagpur (India) — A case study

Surfaces fluxes, turbulent kinetic energy and Flux Richardson number are calculated for three typical sea breeze days characterizing three types of sea breeze onset at an inland station Kharagpur (22°21 N, 87°19 E), 80 km inland, one of the sites for MONTBLEX (MONsoon Trough Boundary Layer EXperiment), in India. The sea breeze onset is associated with a decrease in momentum and heat fluxes and an increase in moisture flux. The turbulent kinetic energy shows quite a significant value even in the late afternoon. The surface layer becomes nearly stable even before sunset, due to the passage of the sea breeze.     

IMPLICIT NONLINEAR NORMAL MODE INITIALIZATION:A MULTIGRID APPROACH

The implicit nonlinear normal mode initialization (INMI) is applied to a tropical limited area shallow water modelin spherical coordinates.The boundary condition for the INMI scheme is based on the boundary formulation of themodel.The INMI scheme is found to be very efficient in suppressing spurious gravity wave oscillation and providing awell balanced initial data set for the model.The INMI scheme involves solving a number of elliptic type equations withvarying complexity.and hence an efficient numerical technique is required for solving such equations.In order to makeINMI computationally more attractive,we are employing the multigrid method for solving all the elliptic type equationsin the INMI scheme.The numerical procedures for the development of such multigrid solvers are briefly described.     

Thermodynamic structure of the monsoon boundary layer under the influence of a large-scale depression

Using data from the MONsoon Trough Boundary Layer EXperiment (MONTBLEX), the thermodynamic structure of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) under the influence of a monsoon depression has been studied. When the depression was in the vicinity of the observing station, the soundings showed an increase in potential temperature, the sub-cloud layer was well mixed, the wind speed increased to 35 m/s, and the monsoon boundary layer was convectively more unstable at night than in the daytime. Cloud-top processes, which lead to an apparent breakdown of the boundary layer, seem to explain this.     

Possibility of continuous monitoring of celestial X-ray sources through their ionization effects in the nocturnal D-region ionosphere

The electron production rates in the night-time D-region arising from the transit of strong celestial X-ray sources Sco X-1, Tau X-1 and Galactic Center are estimated and compared with the ambient electron production rates resulting from other known stable agencies. Using the experimentally measured values of the night-time electron densities, the number of additional electrons/cc expected from the passage of these sources is computed. For the 164 kHz transmission from Tashkent, received at Ahmedabad, the associated enhancement in the attenuation is calculated using the full wave admittance technique of Barron and Budden. Reasonable agreement is shown to exist between the calculated values of the attenuation and those of direct observations.     

Support and Information Effect Modeling for Recoverable Reserve Estimation of a Beach Sand Deposit in India

Application of geostatistics in estimating recoverable reserves of beach sand deposit is rare. This paper made an attempt to estimate local recoverable reserves using disjunctive kriging and discrete Gaussian model considering support and information effects for a beach sand deposit located in the eastern part of India. The dependence of different selective mining unit (SMU) sizes and different production sampling strategies on the estimated tonnage, metal quantity, and the ore tonnage versus metal quantity relationships has been examined. The results of the study show that nonlinear geostatistics should be used for more precise assessment of the grade, ore tonnage, and metal quantity and their relationships, which are necessary for recoverable reserve estimation. In selective mining operation, both support and information effects have significant influence on recoverable reserve. Recoverable reserve estimation based on SMU involves estimating grade distributions of mining unit with much bigger support than the available drill core sample data. Information effect comes into picture from the real scenario where the actual grades of the blocks remain unknown even during mining. At the mining stage, discrimination of ore and waste blocks is carried out based on estimated grades of the production samples and it is likely that the blocks might be misclassified as either ore or waste and thus sent to wrong destination. Information effect modeling makes the estimation more reliable by taking care of misclassification.     

Spatial-Correlation Based Persistent Scatterer Interferometric Study for Ground Deformation

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), nowadays, is a precise technique for monitoring and detecting ground deformation at a millimetric level over large areas using multi-temporal SAR images. Persistent Scatterer Interferometric SAR (PSInSAR), an advanced version of InSAR, is an effective tool for measuring ground deformation using temporally stable reference points or persistent scatterers. We have applied both PSInSAR and Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) methods, based on the spatial correlation of interferometric phase, to estimate the ground deformation and time-series analysis. In this study, we select Las Vegas, Nevada, USA as our test area to detect the ground deformation along satellite line-of-sight (LOS) during November 1992–September 2000 using 44 C-band SAR images of the European Remote Sensing (ERS-1 and ERS-2) satellites. We observe the ground displacement rate of Las Vegas is in the range of ?19 to 8 mm/year in the same period. We also cross-compare PSInSAR and SBAS using mean LOS velocity and time-series. The comparison shows a correlation coefficient of 0.9467 in the case of mean LOS velocity. Along this study, we validate the ground deformation results from the satellite with the ground water depth of Las Vegas using time-series analysis, and the InSAR measurements show similar patterns with ground water data.     

Geophysical anomalies associated with uranium mineralization from Beldih mine, South Purulia Shear Zone, India

Beldih mine at the central part of the South Purulia Shear Zone (SPSZ) has been reported with low grade uranium-bearing formation within quartz-magnetite-apatite host in kaolinized formation. Therefore, the present integrated geophysical study with gravity, magnetic, radiometric, very low frequency electromagnetic (VLF) and gradient resistivity profiling methods around the known mineralized zones aimed at identifying the exact geophysical signatures and lateral extent of these uranium mineralization bands. The closely spaced gravity-magnetic contours over the low to high anomaly transition zones of Bouguer, reduced-to-pole magnetic, and trend surface separated residual gravity-magnetic anomaly maps indicate the possibility of high altered zone(s) along NW-SE direction at the central part of the study area. High current density plots of VLF method and the low resistive zones in gradient resistivity study depict the coincidence with low gravity, moderately high magnetic and low resistivity anomalies at the same locations. Moderate high radioactive zones have also been observed over these locations. This also suggests the existence of radioactive mineralization over this region. Along profile P2, drilled borehole data revealed the presence of uranium mineralization at a depth of ～100 m. The vertical projection of this mineralization band also identified as low gravity, low resistivity and high magnetic anomaly zone. Thus, the application of integrated geophysical techniques supported by geological information successfully recognized the nature of geophysical signatures associated with the uranium mineralization of this region. This enhances the scope of further integrated geophysical investigations in the unexplored regions of SPSZ.     

Earthquake response of external mine overburden dumps: a micromechanical approach

The huge piles of overburden comprising of fragmented rocks and loose soil are dumped within the leasehold area causing serious environmental problems in view of occasional sliding and the risks of miner’s life. The continuum-based numerical approach ignores the discrete nature of the geo-materials found in external overburden dump, in terms of both composition and interactions. Engineering mechanics in the discontinuum regime has been utilized to overcome the mentioned limitations. The distinct element method is employed to characterize the overburden dump geometry and the associated physical behaviour of the dump mass for seismic loads. The study discussed about the earthquake vibration responses and assessed the internal dynamics of the dump mass system.     

Energy Gain of Positive Ions in Solar Polar Coronal Holes

We have investigated heating of solar polar coronal holes and acceleration of fast solar wind by means of lower hybrid (LH) waves. A three-fluid Maxwell model comprising electrons, protons, and α-particles is employed at around two solar radii heliocentric distance, where wave dissipation starts to be dominated by collisionless processes. We suggest specific wavenumber ranges corresponding to LH as well as stochastic instabilities and find that these instabilities may bring about a significant energy gain in positive ions.