River management response to multi-decade changes in timing of reservoir inflows,Columbia River Basin,USA

Around the world, long-term changes in the timing and magnitude of streamflow are testing the ability of large managed water resource systems constructed in the 20th century to continue to meet objectives in the 21st century. Streamflow records for unregulated rivers upstream of reservoirs can be combined with records downstream of reservoirs using a paired-watershed framework and concepts of water resource system performance to assess how reservoir management has responded to long-term change. Using publicly available data, this study quantified how the intra-annual timing of inflows and outflows of 25 major reservoirs has shifted, how management has responded, and how this has influenced reliability and vulnerability of the water resource system in the 668,000 km² Columbia River basin from 1950 to 2012. Reservoir inflows increased slightly in early spring and declined in late spring to early fall, but reservoir outflows increased in late summer from 1950 to 2012. Average inflows to reservoirs in the low flow period exceeded outflows in the1950s, but inflows are now less than outflows. Reservoirs have increased hedging, that is, they have stored more water during the spring, in order to meet the widening gap between inflows and outflows during the summer low flow period. For a given level of reliability (the fraction of time flow targets were met), vulnerability (the maximum departure from the flow target) was greater during periods with lower than average inflows. Thus, the water management system in this large river basin has adjusted to multi-decade trends of declining inflows, but vulnerability, that is, the potential for excess releases in spring and shortfalls in summer, has increased. This study demonstrates the value of combining publicly available historical data on streamflow with concepts from paired-watershed analyses and metrics of water resource performance to detect, evaluate, and manage water resource systems in large river basins.     

An early warning system for wave-driven coastal flooding at Imperial Beach,CA

Natural Hazards - Waves overtop berms and seawalls along the shoreline of Imperial Beach (IB), CA when energetic winter swell and high tide coincide. These intermittent, few-hour long events flood...     

Influence of redox conditions on the intensity of Mars crustal magnetic anomalies

We evaluate the relationship between the intensity of remanent magnetization and fO₂ in natural and synthetic Mars meteorites. The olivine‐phyric shergottite meteorite Yamato 980459 (Y‐980459) and a sulfur‐free synthetic analog (Y‐98*) of identical major element composition were analyzed to explore the rock magnetic and remanence properties of a basalt crystallized from a primitive melt, and to explore the role of magmatic and alteration environment fO₂ on Mars crustal anomalies. The reducing conditions under which Y‐980459 is estimated to have formed (QFM‐2.5; Shearer et al. 2006) were replicated during the synthesis of Y‐98*. Y‐980459 contains pyrrhotite and chromite. Chromite is the only magnetic phase in Y‐98*. The remanence‐carrying capacity of Y‐980459 is comparable to other shergottites that formed in the fO₂ range of QFM‐3 to QFM‐1. The remanence‐carrying capacity of these low fO₂ basalts is 1–2 orders of magnitude too weak to account for the intense crustal anomalies observed in Mars's southern cratered highlands. Moderately oxidizing conditions of >QFM‐1, which are more commonly observed in nakhlites and Noachian breccias, are key to generating either a primary igneous assemblage or secondary alteration assemblage capable of acquiring an intense remanent magnetization, regardless of the basalt character or thermal history. This suggests that if igneous rocks are responsible for the intensely magnetized crust, these oxidizing conditions must have existed in the magmatic plumbing systems of early Mars or must have existed in the crust during secondary processes that led to acquisition of a chemical remanent magnetization.     

Starburst99 for Windows

We present a Windows compatible version of the evolutionary synthesis code Starburst99. Starburst99 for Windows was developed from the public UNIX-based version at STScI. We converted the original Fortran77 source code into a version for a Win32 environment with an Absoft² Fortran Pro x86 compiler. Extensive testing showed no significant numerical differences in comparison with the previous UNIX version. The software application consists of the source code, executable, and a number of auxiliary files. The package installs on any PC running Windows 2000, XP, or Vista and can be obtained as freeware at http://www.stsci.edu/science/starburst/PCStarburst99.html. We give an overview of the different running modes and provide instructions for getting started with the initial set-up.     

Upper-ocean heat budget and ocean eddy transport in the south-east Pacific in a high-resolution coupled model

We present an analysis of the oceanic heat advection and its variability in the upper 500 m in the southeastern tropical Pacific (100W–75W, 25S–10S) as simulated by the global coupled model HiGEM, which has one of the highest resolutions currently used in long-term integrations. The simulated climatology represents a temperature advection field arising from transient small-scale (<450 km) features, with structures and transport that appear consistent with estimates based on available observational data for the mooring at 20S, 85W. The transient structures are very persistent (>4 months), and in specific locations they generate an important contribution to the local upper-ocean heat budget, characterised by scales of a few hundred kilometres, and periods of over a year. The contribution from such structures to the local, long-term oceanic heat budget however can be of either sign, or vanishing, depending on the location; and, although there appears some organisation in preferential areas of activity, the average over the entire region is small. While several different mechanisms may be responsible for the temperature advection by transients, we find that a significant, and possibly dominant, component is associated with vortices embedded in the large-scale, climatological salinity gradient associated with the fresh intrusion of mid-latitude intermediate water which penetrates north-westward beneath the tropical thermocline.     

Large-scale motions of the tropics in observations and theory

Recent observations of the tropical and subtropical atmosphere are interpreted in terms of scaling arguments and wave propagation theory advanced byCharney (1963, 1969).Charney’s idealizations describe the tropical atmosphere in terms of large regions of quasi-nondivergent flow containing small subdomains of heavy convection and divergence, and place emphasis upon the quasi-rotational regions. FGGE (First GARP Global Experiment) observations suggest that strongly divergent local tropical circulations are forced by latent heating and produce important direct modifications of the total wind field. We describe the extent to which the resulting field consists of divergent and rotational components in different analyses of the FGGE data, and present independent supporting documentation of the results in terms of heating estimates and rainfall observations. Local tropical heating rates on the order of 10°C/day are apparently due to latent heat release associated with precipitation rates as large as 6 cm/day during extended periods. The large contribution of the divergent wind is generally underestimated in models that do not retain such energetic local forcings, and this deficiency may be related to general underestimation of tropical-extratropical connections of many linear models. Such connections are commonly cited in relation to El Niño events, the Southern Hemisphere stationary-wave pattern, and in FGGE studies, but are not well simulated in most linear theories. It is not yet clear whether this is an inherent limitation of linear models, or whether the linear models have not yet explored all the potentially relevant ambient states. We explore the latter possibility by construction of a basic state that allows reasonable latitudinal evolution of the wave field. This basic state has zero absolute vorticity gradient throughout the tropics, and deviations linearized about this state are dynamically analogous to a “local” Hadley cell. To the extent that it is appropriate to regard the results in terms of wave propagation, our analysis suggests a prominent role for gravity-inertia waves in the tropics and for the extratropical connections. The relevance of gravity modes to observations and the theoretical explanation of the flat vorticity field remain to be established.