A Simple Field Method for Assessing Near‐Surface Saturated Hydraulic Conductivity

This technical note describes an effective and inexpensive field technique for measuring the saturated hydraulic conductivity of both undisturbed cores and repacked soil samples. The method requires no specialized equipment; everything that is required can be obtained in a hardware store. The method is a straightforward field implementation of the widely used falling‐head laboratory analysis directly derived from Darcy's law. As such, it sidesteps the need for empirical assumptions about soil texture and the relationship between saturated and unsaturated flow components which many permeameter‐based methods rely upon. The method is shown to produce results that are consistent with K values obtained elsewhere in the same homogeneous sand formation. Furthermore, the proposed method is useful for measuring hydraulic conductivity in drill cuttings obtained from direct push or auguring drill techniques, which cannot be done with any other field method. The range of hydraulic conductivity values that this test is appropriate for is on the order of 1E ? 7 m/s to 1E ? 3 m/s.     

一种工业CT点云数据的NURBS曲面重构算法

虽然CT技术已经发展得相当成熟,但保证检测数据重构的精度还存在较大困难。本文将工业CT图像转化为三维散乱点云数据,研究数据预处理算法;对处理后数据进行NURBS曲面插值,完成了对NURBS曲面的重构。以某工件工业CT图像为例,通过VG软件转化为点云数据,利用VC++和OpenGL编程实现数据预处理算法和NURBS曲面拟合,并用实例验证了该曲面造型方法的正确性。     

Impacts of Anthropogenic Land Use Changes on Nutrient Concentrations in Surface Waterbodies: A Review

Increased population leads to land use (LU) changes from natural to urban and agricultural LU. These disturbances not only decrease the natural treatment potential but they also worsen surface water quality (SWQ). The aim of this review is to assess studies about impacts of anthropogenic LU changes on levels of nutrient concentrations in surface waterbodies, highlighting the important parameters needed for an integrated simulation. The results reported in the literature are not always fully consistent. These contradictory results can sometimes be explained by field measurements under different climatic conditions, different features of landscapes, air deposition rates on ground surfaces, and groundwater flow interactions with surface water. Integrated modelling has been suggested to overcome these inconsistencies. Physical‐based and empirical models are the most popular approaches for LU‐SWQ studies. Generally, anthropogenic LU such as agricultural and urban areas usually enhances nutrient concentrations much more than natural lands such as forest and barren. Developing sustainable metropolitan areas instead of rural areas, establishing high‐standard wastewater treatment plants, and practicing efficient fertiliser application would ameliorate the poor nutrient conditions in SWQ. Riparian vegetation, grassed swales, and construction of artificial wetlands as buffer zones are the most promising natural water quality control measures.     

Evaluating Surface Runoff Responses to Land Use Changes in a Data Scarce Basin: a Case Study in Palas Basin,Turkey

Water Resources - In this study, hydrologic regimes of the Palas basin have been investigated with land use/land cover (LULC) change. To investigate the relationship between precipitation and...     

A Wavelet Toolkit for Visualization and Analysis of Large Data Sets in Earthquake Research

— Wavelets have a wide range of useful functions that permit them to effectively treat problems such as data compression, scale-localization analysis, feature extraction, visualization, statistics, numerical simulation, and communication. We discuss their features and their use in an integrated manner to handle large-scale problems in earthquake physics and other nonlinear problems in the solid earth geosciences.     

A Simple Method for Simulating Groundwater Interactions with Fens to Forecast Development Effects

Protection of fens–wetlands dependent on groundwater discharge–requires characterization of groundwater sources and stresses. Because instrumentation and numerical modeling of fens is labor intensive, easy-to-apply methods that model fen distribution and their vulnerability to development are desirable. Here we demonstrate that fen areas can be simulated using existing steady-state MODFLOW models when the unsaturated zone flow (UZF) package is included. In cells where the water table is near land surface, the UZF package calculates a head difference and scaled conductance at these “seepage drain” cells to generate average rates of vertical seepage to the land. This formulation, which represents an alternative to blanketing the MODFLOW domain with drains, requires very little input from the user because unsaturated flow-routing is inactive and results are primarily driven by easily obtained topographic information. Like the drain approach, it has the advantage that the distribution of seepage areas is not predetermined by the modeler, but rather emerges from simulated heads. Beyond the drain approach, it takes account of intracell land surface variation to explicitly quantify multiple surficial flows corresponding to infiltration, rejected recharge, recharge and land-surface seepage. Application of the method to a basin in southeastern Wisconsin demonstrates how it can be used as a decision-support tool to first, reproduce fen distribution and, second, forecast drawdown and reduced seepage at fens in response to shallow pumping.     

A Robust Method for Relative Gravity Data Estimation with High Efficiency

When gravimetric data observations have outliers, using standard least squares (LS) estimation will likely give poor accuracies and unreliable parameter estimates. One of the typical approaches to overcome this problem consists of using the robust estimation techniques. In this paper, we modified the robust estimator of Gervini and Yohai (2002) called REWLSE (Robust and Efficient Weighted Least Squares Estimator), which combines simultaneously high statistical efficiency and high breakdown point by replacing the weight function by a new weight function. This method allows reducing the outlier impacts and makes more use of the information provided by the data. In order to adapt this technique to the relative gravity data, weights are computed using the empirical distribution of the residuals obtained initially by the LTS (Least Trimmed Squares) estimator and by minimizing the mean distances relatively to the LS-estimator without outliers. The robustness of the initial estimator is maintained by adapted cut-off values as suggested by the REWLSE method which allows also a reasonable statistical efficiency. Hereafter we give the advantage and the pertinence of REWLSE procedure on real and semi-simulated gravity data by comparing it with conventional LS and other robust approaches like M- and MM-estimators.     

曲波域不规则地震数据提高分辨率技术研究

受野外观测条件的限制,采集的地震数据体通常不规则,并缺失一部分数据道。传统的单道提高分辨率方法无法兼顾横向地震信息,处理结果存在空间一致性问题。为此,本文提出在曲波域内进行不规则地震数据,通过曲波变换实现对地震数据的稀疏表征,将提高分辨率问题转化为曲波域1-范数约束的稀疏促进求解,得到规则化的高分辨率地震数据体。该方法避免传统单道提高分辨率方法存在的局限性,在提高分辨率的同时,能够恢复缺失的地震数据、压制随机噪声,进而提高地震数据的完备性,模型和实际资料试算,验证了该方法的正确性、有效性和适用性。     

A Simple Extraction-spectrophotometric Method for the Estimation of Dissolved Humic Substances in Water. Part 1: Procedures

Humic substances (HS) can be extracted from water into chloroform in one step by means of cetyl-pyridinium chloride and sodium chloride. The absorbance (at 450 nm) of the extract is proportional to the HS content. Two procedures are presented for HS concentrations of 2 … 20 mg/l and 20 … 200 mg/l water, respectively.     

A Fast Sweeping Scheme for Calculating P Wave First-Arrival Travel Times in Transversely Isotropic Media with an Irregular Surface

Seismic wave propagation shows anisotropic characteristics in many sedimentary rocks. Modern seismic exploration in mountainous areas makes it important to calculate P wave travel times in anisotropic media with irregular surfaces. The challenges in this context are mainly from two aspects. First is how to tackle the irregular surface in a Cartesian coordinate system, and the other lies in solving the anisotropic eikonal equation. Since for anisotropic media the ray (group) velocity direction is not the same as the direction of the travel-time gradient, the travel-time gradient no longer serves as an indicator of the group velocity direction in extrapolating the travel-time field. Recently, a topography-dependent eikonal equation formulated in a curvilinear coordinate system has been established, which is effective for calculating first-arrival travel times in an isotropic model with an irregular surface. Here, we extend the above equation from isotropy to transverse isotropy (TI) by formulating a topography-dependent eikonal equation in TI media in the curvilinear coordinate system, and then use a fast sweeping scheme to solve the topography-dependent anisotropic eikonal equation in the curvilinear coordinate system. Numerical experiments demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of the scheme in calculating P wave travel times in TI models with an irregular surface.     

Use of EGM08 model and shuttle radar topography mission data for geoid computation in the State of Rio de Janeiro,Brazil: A case study with Voronoi/Delaunay discretisations

The EGM08 geopotential model complete to degree and order 2159 was used in a remove-compute-restore (RCR) method for the geoid computation in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Terrain and indirect effect corrections were computed using a 6-arcsec resolution DTE, derived from the TOPODATA Project (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data) raised by the National Institute for Space Research. INPE, Brazil. We applied Voronoi/Delaunay discretisations for discrete Stokes integration. In these schemes, target area is partitioned into polygons/triangles, respectively, and the computation is carried out by point-wise numerical integration and no gridding is mandatory. For both procedures, the cells were produced using either observed gravity data combined with gridded Bouguer derived information. Particularly in Delaunay scheme, as the gravity anomalies are interpolated into the triangular cells, and geoid undulations are computed for their vertices, Stokes function singularity was gone. Externally estimated errors resulting from a comparison with GPS/leveling data were presented for both the schemes and classical ones, as well as for the EGM08 undulations. They yielded RMS differences equal to 0.105 m, 0.110 m, 0.110 m, 0.115 m and 0.228 m, respectively, for Voronoi, Delaunay, Voronoi/Delaunay with gridded-data alone and EGM08, computed between 32 GPS/leveling points.