Seismicity constraints on stress regimes along Sinai subplate boundaries

The relative movement between African, Arabian and Eurasian plates has significantly controlled the tectonic process of Sinai subplate region, although its kinematics and precise boundaries are still doubtful. The respective subplate bounded on both sides by the Aqaba-Dead Sea transform fault to the east and the Gulf of Suez, the only defined part, to the west. Seismicity parameters, moment magnitude relation and fault plane solutions were combined to determine the active tectonics along the aforementioned boundaries. Seven shallow seismogenic zones were defined by the heterogeneity in stress field orientations. Along the eastern boundary, the average fault plane solution obtained from the moment tensor summation (MTS) reveals a sinistral strike-slip faulting mechanism. The corresponding seismic strain rate tensor showed that the present tectonic stress producing earthquakes along the boundary is dominated by both NW-SE compression and NE-SW dilatation. Towards the north, the average focal mechanism showed a normal faulting mechanism of N185°E compression and an N94°E extension in the Carmel Fairi seismic zone. On the other hand, the active crustal deformation along the western boundary (Gulf of Suez region) showed a prevailing tensional stress regime of NE to ENE orientations; producing an average fault plane solution of normal faulting mechanism. The seismic strain rate tensor reveals a dominant stress regime of N58°E extension and N145°E compression in consistence with the general tectonic nature in northeastern Africa. Finally, the extensional to strike-slip stress regimes obtained in the present study emphasize that the deformation accommodated along the Sinai subplate boundaries are in consistence with the kinematics models along the plate boundaries representing the northern extremity part of the Red Sea region.     

Wave breaking and bubble formation associate energy dissipation and wave setup

Ocean Dynamics - In this work, theoretical development of void fraction effect over wave energy dissipation and wave setup in a surf zone is made. The formulation incorporates simple energy...     

Shear Wave Splitting Analysis to Estimate Fracture Orientation and Frequency Dependent Anisotropy

Shear wave splitting is a well-known method for indication of orientation, radius, and length of fractures in subsurface layers. In this paper, a three component near offset VSP data acquired from a fractured sandstone reservoir in southern part of Iran was used to analyse shear wave splitting and frequency-dependent anisotropy assessment. Polarization angle obtained by performing rotation on radial and transverse components of VSP data was used to determine the direction of polarization of fast shear wave which corresponds to direction of fractures. It was shown that correct implementation of shear wave splitting analysis can be used for determination of fracture direction. During frequencydependent anisotropy analysis, it was found that the time delays in shearwaves decrease as the frequency increases. It was clearly demonstrated throughout this study that anisotropy may have an inverse relationship with frequency. The analysis presented in this paper complements the studied conducted by other researchers in this field of research.     

Effective impervious area for runoff in urban watersheds

Effective impervious area (EIA), or the portion of total impervious area (TIA) that is hydraulically connected to the storm sewer system, is an important parameter in determining actual urban runoff. EIA has implications in watershed hydrology, water quality, environment, and ecosystem services. The overall goal of this study is to evaluate the application of successive weighted least square (WLS) method to urban catchments with different sizes and various hydrologic conditions to determine EIA fraction. Other objectives are to develop insights on the data selection issues, EIA fraction, EIA/TIA ratio, and runoff source area patterns in urban catchments. The successive WLS method is applied to 50 urban catchments with different sizes from less than 1 ha to more than 2000 ha in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, USA as well as Europe, Canada, and Australia. The average, median, and standard deviation of EIA fractions for the 42 catchments with residential land uses are found to be 0.222, 0.200, and 0.113, respectively. These values for the EIA/TIA ratio in the same 42 catchments are 0.50, 0.48, and 0.21, respectively. While the EIA/TIA results indicate the importance of EIA, 95% prediction interval of the mean EIA/TIA is found to be 0.07 to 0.93, which shows that using an average value for this ratio in each land use to determine EIA from TIA in ungauged urban watersheds can be misleading. The successive WLS method was robust and is recommended for determining EIA in gauged urban catchments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the fairing of resistance test data: A software-based approach

A fairing method is presented for giving a good representation of ship model resistance test data, which in general tend to exhibit a scattered trend and need to be smoothed appropriately. One component of the test data originates from the frictional resistance and can be formulated smoothly. The second component is the wave resistance which exhibits a specific harmonic character with peaks and troughs. In this method, this component is modelled using suitable harmonic cosine terms for obtaining the best representation of the corresponding resistance data. The performance of the method is then tested on two example cases, using the characteristic parameters of the sample data as input during the smoothing process.