Contribution of remote sensing and GIS to analysis of the risk of flooding in the Zat basin (High Atlas-Morocco)

Natural Hazards - Despite the controversy regarding their use, school buildings are often assigned as emergency evacuation shelters, temporary accommodation and aid distribution hubs following...     

Red Sea faulting and salt diapirism as a potential geotechnical hazard in Jazan,southwest Saudi Arabia: inferences from gravity data

Natural Hazards - The main objective of this study is to detect the subsurface extension of salt diapirs and structural deformations in the city of Jazan and its suburbs using gravity data. Salt...     

Mineralogy and geochemistry of fine-grained Dahab stream sediments,Southeastern Sinai,Egypt: emphasis on the intergrowths of Fe–Ti oxides

Acta Geochimica - Mineralogical and geochemical characteristics of stream sediments collected from 30 stations in the Dahab-Wadi Kid area (southeastern Sinai, Egypt) are presented. The studied...     

Discovery of lamproites near Vattikod Area, NW margin of the Cuddapah basin, Eastern Dharwar craton, southern India

A cluster of lamproite dykes are located 1 km west of Vattikod village at the NW margin of the Cuddapah basin, Eastern Dharwar craton, southern India, during the pursuit for locating primary diamond source rocks by adapting multifarious applications. These exotic rocks are emplaced along WNW-ESE to NW-SE trending fractures in the granitic rocks belonging to the Peninsular Gneissic Complex. Ten out of twelve lamproites occur near Vattikod village and one each is located in the vicinity of Marepalli and Gundrapalli villages respectively. These lamproites, though highly altered, contain microphenocrysts of altered olivine, clinopyroxene, phlogopite, leucite and sanidine and translucent to opaque, amoeboid shaped patches of glass set in a groundmass rich in carbonate, phlogopite, serpentine, and chlorite. This new cluster of lamproites constitutes a part of the recently discovered Ramadugu lamproite field. The Vattikod and Ramadugu lamproites, together with those from Krishna lamproite field and the Cuddapah basin, constitute, a wide spectrum of ultrapotassic magmatism emplaced in and around the Palaeo-Mesoproterozoic Cuddapah basin in southern India.     

Quantile regression C-vine copula model for spatial extremes

A spatial quantile regression model is proposed to estimate the quantile curve for a given probability of non-exceedance, as function of locations and covariates. Canonical vines copulas are considered to represent the spatial dependence structure. The marginal at each location is an asymmetric Laplace distribution where the parameters are functions of the covariates. The full conditional quantile distribution is given using the Joe–Clayton copula. Simulations show the flexibility of the proposed model to estimate the quantiles with special dependence structures. A case study illustrates its applicability to estimate quantiles for spatial temperature anomalies.     

Hydrothermal alteration and evolution of Zr-Th-U-REE mineralization in the microgranite of Wadi Ras Abda,North Eastern Desert,Egypt

Ras Abda plutonic suite, North Eastern Desert of Egypt, consists predominantly of Neoproterozoic calc-alkaline older granites. Minor exposures of pink microgranite are occurring along Wadi Ras Abda within the older granites. Previous studies on this area demonstrated that the microgranite is altered in some parts and contains anomalous concentrations of rare metal elements (Zr, Th, and U). These altered and mineralized zones are re-assessed using field observations, chemical analysis, and by the application of various transmitted light and electron microscopic techniques. The rare metals exist as mineral segregation grew freely into open cavities of the microgranite and concordant with the NNE strike-slip fault movement. The mineralized zones contain an assemblage of secondary magnetite, zircon, uranothorite, columbite-(Mn), fergusonite-(Y), and allanite-(Ce). The extreme abundance of zircon in the mineralized zone, along with other evidence, indicates a hydrothermal origin of this zircon together with associated rare metals. The geochemical investigation and mass balance calculations revealed extreme enrichment of Zr, Th, U, Y, Nb, Ta, and REE. Post-magmatic hydrothermal alterations resulted in such pronounced chemical and mineralogical heterogeneity. The hydrothermal fluids are thought to be oxidizing, alkaline and of medium temperature (>?250 °C). The average contents of the elements Zr (1606 ppm), Th (1639 ppm), U (306 ppm), Nb (955 ppm), and REE (1710 ppm) in the mineralized microgranite reach sub-economic levels and could be a potential source of these elements.     

Analysis of physical factors of climate and bioclimate and their effects on almonds production to increase the economy in Hebron area of Palestine

For the 1993–2009 period, we analyzed the relationship between almond yield and three climatic variables (mean annual temperature, soil water reserve, and precipitation), and four bioclimatic variables (annual ombrothermic index, water deficit, simple continentality index, and compensated thermicity index), for one major Hebron crop (soft and hard almonds). Moreover, we obtained data almond production from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, while the climate data from the Palestinian meteorological station during the study period from 1993 to 2009, and analysis is it by using bioclimatic classification of the Earth of Salvador Rivas-Martinez to study the relationship between the almond yield and climate and bioclimate factors (variables). The climatic and bioclimate variables of greatest importance to almond were used to develop regressions analysis relating yield to climatic conditions. Hebron was positively affected by annual ombrothermic index, simple continentality index, precipitation, water soil reserve, and mean annual temperature, but negatively affected by water deficit, with a large proportion of the variance explained by axis F1 (72.48%), F2 (22.38%), and axes F1and F2 (94. 86%). However, in order to produce a high amount of almonds and quality, it can be grown in the regions of the mesomediterranean region, with the value of annual ombrothemic index more than 3, compensated thermicity index between 220/220 to 350/350, simple continentality index between 14 and 20, and in areas where the average annual temperature is between 15 and 20 °C.     

Automatic identification of fake patterns caused by short-width wavelets in seismic data

Despite the popularity of using the Haar wavelet filter in many applications, it sometimes introduces fake patterns into the multi resolution analysis (MRA) of seismic data. In this work, we compared different wavelet filters to demonstrate that these patterns are fake and not part of the original waveforms and to show that they are a result of using the Haar wavelet filter as a short-width wavelet. To achieve this, many seismic waveforms from two different sources: the Egyptian National Seismic Network (ENSN) and the High Sensitivity Seismograph Network Japan (Hi-net) are used with different wavelet filters. We propose an algorithm based on an autoregressive (AR) model to detect these patterns automatically and fully.