Soil creep: problems raised by a 23 year study in Australia

In October 1965 and February 1966, 55 Young-pits were installed in tropical Northern Territory (NT) and temperate New South Wales (NSW). Pits were monitored in 1968, 1971 and 1974; also, for the NT only, in 1988. In each region, half of the pits are on weathered granite, and half on sandstone. Local relief is 30m or less, and slopes are up to 20°. Annual rainfall is evenly distributed in the NSW sites (800 mm a⁻¹), but is confined to the five to six month wet season in NT (1200 mm a⁻¹). Six pits suffered external disturbance and so were not analysed. Analysis of 160 rods in 49 undisturbed pits shows: (1) vectorial movement generally not downslope parallel to the ground surface, but dominated by a vertically downward component; (2) significant uphill and vertically upward components of movement for many rods; (3) a weak correlation between total movement and sine of slope; (4) rapid movement during 1965-68, and slow movement thereafter; (5) significantly higher creep rates on the NT granites than on all other sites, perhaps because mound-building termites are especially active there. We conclude that our data do not support soil creep models which assume that all movement is downslope and slope-parallel. Repeated long-term measurements are essential to distinguish long-term creep rates from the short-term effects of disturbance. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effect of heterogeneity on spatiotemporal variations of groundwater level in a bounded unconfined aquifer

Spatiotemporal variations of groundwater level due to a white noise recharge time series and a random transmissivity field in a bounded unconfined aquifer was studied. The analytical solutions for the variance and covariance of groundwater level were derived with non-stationary spectral analyses and superposition principle. It was found that the fluctuations of groundwater level are spatially non-stationary due to a fixed head boundary condition and temporal non-stationary at early time but gradually became stationary as time progresses due to effect of the initial condition. The variation in groundwater level is mainly caused by the random source/sink in the case of temporally random recharge and spatially random transmissivity. The effect of heterogeneity is to increase the variation of groundwater level and the maximum effect occurs close to the constant head boundary because of the linear mean hydraulic gradient. The heterogeneity also enhances the correlation of groundwater level, especially at large time intervals and small spatial distances.     

The inclusion of differentially assessed lands in urban growth model calibration: a comparison of two approaches using SLEUTH

This research sought to understand the role that differentially assessed lands (lands in the United States given tax breaks in return for their guarantee to remain in agriculture) play in influencing urban growth. Our method was to calibrate the SLEUTH urban growth model under two different conditions. The first used an excluded layer that ignored such lands, effectively rendering them available for development. The second treated those lands as totally excluded from development. Our hypothesis was that excluding those lands would yield better metrics of fit with past data. Our results validate our hypothesis since two different metrics that evaluate goodness of fit both yielded higher values when differentially assessed lands are treated as excluded. This suggests that, at least in our study area, differential assessment, which protects farm and ranch lands for tenuous periods of time, has indeed allowed farmland to resist urban development. Including differentially assessed lands also yielded very different calibrated coefficients of growth as the model tried to account for the same growth patterns over two very different excluded areas. Excluded layer design can greatly affect model behavior. Since differentially assessed lands are quite common through the United States and are often ignored in urban growth modeling, the findings of this research can assist other urban growth modelers in designing excluded layers that result in more accurate model calibration and thus forecasting.     

Photoionized Hβ emission in NGC 5548: it breathes!

Emission-line regions in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and other photoionized nebulae should become larger in size when the ionizing luminosity increases. This 'breathing' effect is observed for the Hβ emission in NGC 5548 by using Hβ and optical continuum light curves from the 13-yr (1989–2001) AGN Watch monitoring campaign. To model the breathing, we use two methods to fit the observed light curves in detail: (i) parametrized models and, (ii) the memecho reverberation-mapping code. Our models assume that optical continuum variations track the ionizing radiation, and that the Hβ variations respond with time-delays τ due to light travel-time. By fitting the data using a delay-map  Ψ(τ, F _c)  that is allowed to change with continuum flux F _c, we find that the strength of the Hβ response decreases and the time-delay increases with ionizing luminosity. The parametrized breathing models allow the time-delay and the Hβ flux to depend on the continuum flux so that,  τ∝ F ^β_c  and   F _Hβ∝ F ^α_c  . Our fits give  0.1 < β < 0.46  and  0.57 < α < 0.66. α  is consistent with previous work by Gilbert and Peterson, and Goad, Korista and Knigge. Although we find β to be flatter than previously determined by Peterson et al. using cross-correlation methods, it is closer to the predicted values from recent theoretical work by Korista and Goad.     

A general-purpose parallel raster processing programming library test application using a geographic cellular automata model

A general-purpose parallel raster processing programming library (pRPL) was developed and applied to speed up a commonly used cellular automaton model with known tractability limitations. The library is suitable for use by geographic information scientists with basic programming skills, but who lack knowledge and experience of parallel computing and programming. pRPL is a general-purpose programming library that provides generic support for raster processing, including local-scope, neighborhood-scope, regional-scope, and global-scope algorithms as long as they are parallelizable. The library also supports multilayer algorithms. Besides the standard data domain decomposition methods, pRPL provides a spatially adaptive quad-tree-based decomposition to produce more evenly distributed workloads among processors. Data parallelism and task parallelism are supported, with both static and dynamic load-balancing. By grouping processors, pRPL also supports data–task hybrid parallelism, i.e., data parallelism within a processor group and task parallelism among processor groups. pSLEUTH, a parallel version of a well-known cellular automata model for simulating urban land-use change (SLEUTH), was developed to demonstrate full utilization of the advanced features of pRPL. Experiments with real-world data sets were conducted and the performance of pSLEUTH measured. We conclude not only that pRPL greatly reduces the development complexity of implementing a parallel raster-processing algorithm, it also greatly reduces the computing time of computationally intensive raster-processing algorithms, as demonstrated with pSLEUTH.     

The Organization of Production in High Technology Industries: An Empirical Assessment*

Recent attention given to the concept of vertical integration and disintegration of production processes has identified the existence of a continuum, with small, flexibly specialized producers at one end and large, mass production units at the other end. Firms along the continuum constantly strive for the optimum combination of economies of scale and scope. This paper attempts to identify the organizational characteristics of high technology firms in one industrial complex of the U.S. Manufacturing Belt. A principal components analysis is performed on a number of theoretically relevant variables for a sample of high technology establishments in Northeast Ohio. The results indicate that the region contains a variety of organizational forms ranging from isolated workshops to large, vertically integrated assembly plants. These findings conform to expectations derived from recent conceptualizations in the literature. Additional empirical research will further enhance understanding of the processes that shape the organization of production in territorial complexes.     

Geology and regional significance of the Sarnoo Hills,eastern rift margin of the Barmer Basin,NW India

The Barmer Basin is a poorly understood rift basin in Rajasthan, northwest India. Exposures in the Sarnoo Hills, situated along the central eastern rift margin of the Barmer Basin, reveal a sedimentary succession that accumulated prior to the main Barmer Basin rift event, and a rift‐oblique fault network that displays unusual geometries and characteristics. Here, we present a comprehensive study of Lower Cretaceous sedimentology on the basin margin, along with a detailed investigation of rift‐oblique faults that are exposed nowhere else in the region and provide critical insights into Barmer Basin evolution. Lower Cretaceous sediments were deposited within a rapidly subsiding alluvial plain fluvial system. Subsequent to deposition, the evolving Sarnoo Hills fault network was affected by structural inheritance during an early, previously unrecognised, rift‐oblique extensional event attributed to transtension between India and Madagascar, and formed a juvenile fault network within the immediate rift‐margin footwall. Ghaggar‐Hakra Formation deposition may have been triggered by early rifting which tectonically destabilised the Marwar Craton prior to the main northeast–southwest Barmer Basin rift event. The identification of early rifting in the Barmer Basin demonstrates that regional extension and the associated rift systems were established throughout northwest India prior to the main phase of Deccan eruptions. Inheritance of early oblique fault systems within the evolving Barmer Basin provides a robust explanation for poorly understood structural complications interpreted in the subsurface throughout the rift. Critically, the presence of syn‐rift sedimentary successions within older oblique rift systems obscured beneath the present‐day Barmer Basin has significant implications for hydrocarbon exploration.     

Feature Extraction in Remote Sensing High-Dimensional Image Data

High-dimensional image data open new possibilities in remote sensing digital image classification, particularly when dealing with classes that are spectrally very similar. The main problem refers to the estimation of a large number of classifier's parameters. One possible solution to this problem consists in reducing the dimensionality of the original data without a significant loss of information. In this letter, a new approach to reduce data dimensionality is proposed. In the proposed methodology, each pixel's curve of spectral response is initially segmented, and the digital numbers (DNs) at each segment are replaced by a smaller number of statistics. In this letter, the proposed statistics are the mean and variance of the segment's DNs, which are supposed to carry information about the segment's position and shape, respectively. Tests were performed by using Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer hyperspectral image data. The experiments have shown that this methodology is capable of providing very acceptable results, in addition of being computationally efficient     

The interpretation of reaction textures in Fe‐rich metapelitic granulites of the Musgrave Block,central Australia: constraints from mineral equilibria calculations in the system K2O–FeO–MgO–Al2O3–SiO2–H2O–TiO2–Fe2O3

Fe‐rich metapelitic granulites of the Musgrave Block, central Australia, contain several symplectic and coronal reaction textures that post‐date a peak S2 metamorphic assemblage involving garnet, sillimanite, spinel, ilmenite, K‐feldspar and quartz. The earliest reaction textures involve spinel‐ and quartz‐bearing symplectites that enclose garnet and to a lesser extent sillimanite. The symplectic spinel and quartz are in places separated by later garnet and/or sillimanite coronas. The metamorphic effects of a later, D3, event are restricted to zones of moderate to high strain where a metamorphic assemblage of garnet, sillimanite, K‐feldspar, magnetite, ilmenite, quartz and biotite is preserved. Quantitative mineral equilibria calculations in the system K₂O–FeO–MgO–Al₂O₃–SiO₂–H₂O–TiO₂–Fe₂O₃ (KFMASHTO) using Thermocalc 3.0 and the accompanying internally consistent dataset provide important constraints on the influence of TiO₂ and Fe₂O₃ on biotite‐bearing and spinel‐bearing equilibria, respectively. Biotite‐bearing equilibria are shifted to higher temperatures and spinel‐bearing equilibria to higher pressures and lower temperatures in comparison to the equivalent equilibria in K₂O–FeO–MgO–Al₂O₃–SiO₂–H₂O (KFMASH). The sequence of reaction textures involving spinel is consistent with a D2 P–T path that involved a small amount of decompression followed predominantly by cooling within a single mineral assemblage stability field. Thus, the reaction textures reflect changes in modal proportions within an equilibrium assemblage rather than the crossing of a univariant reaction. The D3 metamorphic assemblage is consistent with lower temperatures than those inferred for D2.