An scientific evaluation of annual earthquake prediction ability

Introduction There have been nearly 40 years for earthquake prediction since the research on earthquake prediction was carried out in plan by some advanced countries since 1960s. For the hard long process of earthquake prediction, Alen, American famous scientist and former president of the evaluation commission of earthquake prediction in California, USA, said that the difficulty of earthquake prediction is more than the expected and the practical progress of earthquake prediction is more sl…     

An analysis on short—wave components of the global stress field

Introduction The intraplate stresses are affected by two types of forces: one is called the first-order stresses (Zoback, 1992) or the long-wave components of stresses, which are closely related to the driving mechanism of the plate motions such as ridge push, continental collision resistance, slab pull (suc-tion) and mantle drag force (Richardson, 1992; WEI, 2000). This type of stress field is character-ized by a uniform feature in very large horizontal scale with 50 times or more of the th…     

Prediction analysis of long-term memory effect for calamity gray series

Are human able to foresee the future? For thou-sands of years close attention has been paid to this issue. At the present day, in order to survive from competition and to predominate over the nature, hu-man抯 desire of forecasting things has become more and more intense. Compared to conquering space, more people yearn for being able to control the time. From ancient to the present, mankind always dream of contacting the past, governing the present and tran-scending the future. Recent years in…     

Functional time series analysis of spatio–temporal epidemiological data

Spatio–temporal statistical models have been proposed for the analysis of the temporal evolution of the geographical pattern of mortality (or incidence) risks in disease mapping. However, as far as we know, functional approaches based on Hilbert-valued processes have not been used so far in this area. In this paper, the autoregressive Hilbertian process framework is adopted to estimate the functional temporal evolution of mortality relative risk maps. Specifically, the penalized functional estimation of log-relative risk maps is considered to smooth the classical standardized mortality ratio. The reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) norm is selected for definition of the penalty term. This RKHS-based approach is combined with the Kalman filtering algorithm for the spatio–temporal estimation of risk. Functional confidence intervals are also derived for detecting high risk areas. The proposed methodology is illustrated analyzing breast cancer mortality data in the provinces of Spain during the period 1975–2005. A simulation study is performed to compare the ARH(1) based estimation with the classical spatio–temporal conditional autoregressive approach.     

An input–output analysis of Australian water usage

Australia's annual water use of 22,000 Gl is dissected using input–output techniques, showing that 30% of Australia's water requirement was devoted to domestic food production and a further 30% to exports, compared with 7% required for direct consumption by households. There is a net annual trade deficit in embodied water of approximately 4000 Gl. A strong relationship exists between water requirement and expenditure. If by 2050 Australia's population grows to 25 million people and per-capita expenditure doubles, the annual water requirement may more than double to 50,000 Gl, equivalent to half the nation's water flows. While this increase may be improbable it gives the challenge that the water required to deliver a unit of output across the whole economy may have to reduce by a factor of two, if population growth and economic growth are to meet policy expectations.     

Reconstruction of sunspot characteristics for 1853–1879

The Carrington (1853?C1861) and Sp?rer (1861?C1879) catalogs of sunspot drawings have been digitized. In the Carrington catalog, 9831 sunspots and 4946 umbrages were detected on daily drawings and 3762 sunspots and 1730 umbrages on synoptic maps. This allowed us to reconstruct the characteristics of 3069 sunspot groups for the period from November 9, 1853, to April 1, 1861. In the Sp?rer catalogs, 12402 sun-spots and about 5000 umbrages were detected for 1861?C1879. Sunspots and umbrages were detected semiautomatically, a heliographic grid was plotted, and sunspot groups were formed when the images were processed. The digitized data made it possible to determine the coordinates, areas, relative position, and other geometric parameters of individual sunspots, umbrages, and sunspot groups. These data make it possible to study in detail the fine structure at the end of cycle 9 and in cycles 10 and 11. An electron database of the detected structures has been created.     

Statistical analysis of the 2012–2013 Torreperogil–Sabiote seismic series,Spain

The study of earthquake swarms and their characteristics can improve our understanding of the transient processes that provoke seismic crises. The spatio-temporal process of the energy release is often linked with changes of statistical properties, and thus, seismicity parameters can help to reveal the underlying mechanism in time and space domains. Here, we study the Torreperogil–Sabiote 2012–2013 seismic series (southern Spain), which was relatively long lasting, and it was composed by more than 2000 events. The largest event was a magnitude 3.9 event which occurred on February 5, 2013. It caused slight damages, but it cannot explain the occurrence of the whole seismic crises which was not a typical mainshock–aftershock sequence. To shed some light on this swarm occurrence, we analyze the change of statistical properties during the evolution of the sequence, in particular, related to the magnitude and interevent time distributions. Furthermore, we fit a modified version of the epidemic type aftershock sequence (ETAS) model in order to investigate changes of the background rates and the trigger potential. Our results indicate that the sequence was driven by an aseismic transient stressing rate and that the system passes after the swarm occurrence to a new forcing regime with more typical tectonic characteristics.     

Complexity–entropy analysis of daily stream flow time series in the continental United States

Complexity–entropy causality plane (CECP) is a diagnostic diagram plotting normalized Shannon entropy \({\cal H}_S\) versus Jensen–Shannon complexity \({\cal C}_{JS}\) that has been introduced in nonlinear dynamics analysis to classify signals according to their degrees of randomness and complexity. In this study, we explore the applicability of CECP in hydrological studies by analyzing 80 daily stream flow time series recorded in the continental United States during a period of 75 years, surrogate sequences simulated by autoregressive models (with independent or long-range memory innovations), Theiler amplitude adjusted Fourier transform and Theiler phase randomization, and a set of signals drawn from nonlinear dynamic systems. The effect of seasonality, and the relationships between the CECP quantifiers and several physical and statistical properties of the observed time series are also studied. The results point out that: (1) the CECP can discriminate chaotic and stochastic signals in presence of moderate observational noise; (2) the signal classification depends on the sampling frequency and aggregation time scales; (3) both chaotic and stochastic systems can be compatible with the daily stream flow dynamics, when the focus is on the information content, thus setting these results in the context of the debate on observational equivalence; (4) the empirical relationships between \({\mathcal H}_S\) and \({\mathcal C}_{JS}\) and Hurst parameter H, base flow index, basin drainage area and stream flow quantiles highlight that the CECP quantifiers can be considered as proxies of the long-term low-frequency groundwater processes rather than proxies of the short-term high-frequency surface processes; (6) the joint application of linear and nonlinear diagnostics allows for a more comprehensive characterization of the stream flow time series.     

An exploration of incorporating site response into PSHA—Part I: Issues related to site response analysis methods

This paper presents a series of analyses for the evaluation of the ground response of two NEHRP class D sites, subjected to shaking by a large number of strong ground-motion records. The two investigated sites have very distinct profiles, but they are characterised by almost identical V_s30 values. The site response analyses are performed using various methods of analysis and input parameters in order to explore the sensitivity of the ground response estimates and to identify the dominating parameters. Equivalent linear analysis is performed using different sets of dynamic soil properties curves, while nonlinear analysis is performed using different target dynamic soil curves, viscous damping formulations and fitting procedures for the constitutive model parameters. Particular focus is given to the sensitivity of the response when soil sites are subjected to high-intensity shaking, a subject of particular interest when the prediction of surface ground motions with low annual probabilities of exceedance is the target of probabilistic seismic hazard analyses (PSHA). The site response analysis results of this paper are incorporated into the probabilistic framework of Bazzurro and Cornell [1] in our companion paper in order to assess their impact on the final soil surface hazard calculation.     

An equivalent-boundary method for the shell analysis of buried pipelines under fault movement

Introduction The history of research work on the response of buried pipeline under the fault movement hasbeen about 30 years. Several simplified design methods have been proposed to obtain the maxi-mum stress or strain in pipe. These methods include the theoretical method and the finite elementmethod (FEM). In the theoretical method, the pipe is usually modeled as a cable (Newmark, Hall1975; Kennedy, et al, 1977) or a beam (Wang, Wang, 1995; LIU, ZHANG, 2002). These theoreti-cal me…     

Variations in the large-scale polar solar magnetic flux: The average annual series of the Π index in 1858–2006

A long series of the known Π index of the solar corona structure has been proposed. It seems that this index, which characterizes the limb extension of polar coronal plume systems, is of importance because it is related to the large-scale polar solar magnetic flux. Solar corona photographs and drawings during total solar eclipses, collected for 13 solar activity cycles from different sources (78 eclipses), as well as H-alpha map data on the drift of the high-latitude belt of filaments before polarity reversal of the polar magnetic field have been used. Daily solar corona images, obtained on the SOHO spacecraft (using an EIT ultraviolet telescope), have been additionally used.     

An efficient approach for frequency-domain and time-domain hydrodynamic analysis of dam–reservoir systems

An efficient procedure is developed for the hydrodynamic analysis of dam–reservoir systems. The governing equations of hydrodynamic pressure in the frequency as well as time domain are derived in the framework of the scaled boundary finite element method. The water compressibility and absorption of reservoir sediments can be conveniently taken into consideration. By extending the reservoir to infinity with uniform cross-section, only the dam–reservoir interface needs to be discretized to model the fluid domain, and the hydrodynamic pressure in the stream direction is solved analytically. Several numerical examples including a gravity dam with an inclined upstream face and an arch dam with a reservoir of arbitrary cross-section are provided to demonstrate the computational efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Role of reservoirs in sustained seismicity of Koyna-Warna region—a statistical analysis

Koyna-Warna region in western India is a globally recognized site of reservoir-triggered seismicity near the Koyna and Warna reservoirs. The region has been reported with several M?>?5 earthquakes in the last five decades including M6.3 Koyna earthquake which is considered as the largest triggered earthquake worldwide. In the present study, a detailed statistical analysis has been done for long period earthquake catalogues during 1968–2004 of MERI and 2005–2012 of CSIR-NGRI to find out the spatio-temporal influence of the Koyna and Warna reservoirs impoundment on the seismicity of the region. Depending upon the earthquake clusters, we divided the region into three different zones and performed power spectrum and singular spectrum analysis (SSA) on them. For the time period 1983–1995, the earthquake zone near the Warna reservoir; for 1996–2004, the earthquake zone near the Koyna reservoir; and for 2005–2012, the earthquake zone near the Warna reservoir found to be influenced by the annual water level variations in the reservoirs that confirm the continuous role of both the reservoirs in the seismicity of the Koyna-Warna region.     

Joint frequency analysis and uncertainty estimation of coupled rainfall–runoff series relying on historical and simulated data

ABSTRACT

Joint frequency analysis and quantile estimation of extreme rainfall and runoff (ERR) are crucial for hydrological engineering designs. The joint quantile estimation of the historical ERR events is subject to uncertainty due to the errors that exist with flow height measurements. This study is motivated by the interest in introducing the advantages of using Hydrologic Simulation Program-Fortran (HSPF) simulations to reduce the uncertainties of the joint ERR quantile estimations in Taleghan watershed. Bivariate ERR quantile estimation was first applied on P_AMS-Q_SIM pairs and the results were compared against the historical rainfall–runoff data (P_AMS-Q_obs). Student’s t and Frank copulas with respectively Gaussian-P3 and Gaussian-LN3 marginal distributions well suited to fit the P_AMS-Q_obs and P_AMS-Q_SIM pairs. Results revealed that confidence regions (CRs) around the p levels become wider for P_AMS-Q_obs compared to P_AMS-Q_SIM, indicating the lower sampling uncertainties of HSPF simulations compared to the historical observations for bivariate ERR frequency analysis.     

Producing time series of river water height by means of satellite radar altimetry—a comparative study

Abstract

Satellite radar altimetry is complementary to in situ limnimetric surveys as a means of estimating the water height of large rivers, lakes and flood plains. Production of water height time series by satellite radar altimetry technology requires first the selection of radar ground target locations corresponding to water body surfaces under study, i.e. the definition of “virtual limnimetric stations”. We propose to investigate qualitative and quantitative differences between three representative virtual station creation methodologies: (a) a fully manual method, (b) a semi-automatic method based on a land cover characterization that allows the water body surface under study to be located; and (c) an original fully automatic procedure that exploits a digital elevation model and an estimation of the river width. The results yielded by these three methods are comparable: maximum absolute magnitudes of water height differences being 0.46, 0.26 and 0.15 m for, respectively, 95, 90 and 80% of the water height values obtained. Moreover, more than 67% and 92% of time series jointly produced by the methods present root mean square differences lower than 20 and 50 cm, respectively. The results show that the fully automatic method developed herein provides as reliable results as the fully manual one. This opens the way to use of satellite radar altimetry for the generation of water height time series on a large scale, and considerably extends the applicability of satellite radar altimetry in hydrology.

Citation Roux, E., Santos da Silva, J., Vieira Getirana, A. C., Bonnet, M.-P., Calmant, S., Martinez, J.-M. & Seyler, F. (2010) Producing time series of river water height by means of satellite radar altimetry—comparative study. Hydrol. Sci. J. 55(1), 104–120.     

An explicit finite element method for dy—namic analysis in three—medium coupling system and its application

In this paper,an explicit finite element method to analyze the dynamic responses of three-medium coupled systems with any terrain is developed on the basis of the numerical simulation of the continuous conditions on the bounda-ries among fluid saturated porous medium,elastic single-phase medium and ideal fluid medium.This method is a very effective one with the characteristic of high calculating speed and small memory needed because the formulae for this explicit finite element method have the characteristic of decoupling,and which does not need to solve sys-tem of linear equations.The method is applied to analyze the dynamic response of a reservoir with considering the dynamic interactions among water,dam,sediment and basement rock.The vertical displacement at the top point of the dam is calculated and some conclusions are given.     

Fractal analysis applied to faults and earthquakes——A case study of China

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