Sedimentation in the Narrabeen Group,southern Sydney basin,New South Wales

A study of the Narrabeen Group in the southern part of the Sydney Basin has provided a more complete understanding of the conditions of deposition in the area during the Lower Triassic. The sedimentology of the sequence indicates that several different types of fluvial deposits are represented, with an upward succession from piedmont conditions with braided streams to a swampy deltaic plain. This sequence is interpreted as the onshore portion of a slow marine transgression, probably brought about by declining erosive activity in the hinterland.

The palaeocurrent pattern shows that drainage was principally to the south‐southwest, parallel to the basin axis, and the lateral transition from quartzose to lithic sediments across the basin can be interpreted as a blending of sediment from western and northern source areas. In addition several influxes of material from a source east of the present coastline are indicated, with reworked volcanic debris being introduced into the south coast district. This southeasterly source area did not greatly impede the drainage of the basin during lower Narrabeen deposition, but was responsible for a major diversion of stream patterns as the topmost beds were laid down. This diversion was completed by a northeasterly drainage pattern during deposition of the overlying Hawkesbury Sandstone.     

Multi-year prediction skill of Atlantic hurricane activity in CMIP5 decadal hindcasts

Using a statistical relationship between simulated sea surface temperature and Atlantic hurricane activity, we estimate the skill of a CMIP5 multi-model ensemble at predicting multi-annual level of Atlantic hurricane activity. The series of yearly-initialized hindcasts show positive skill compared to simpler forecasts such as persistence and climatology as well as non-initialized forecasts and return anomaly correlation coefficients of ～0.6 and ～0.8 for five and nine year forecasts, respectively. Some skill is shown to remain in the later years and making use of those later years to create a lagged-ensemble yields, for individual models, results that approach that obtained by the multi-model ensemble. Some of the skill is shown to come from persisting rather than predicting the climate shift that occur in 1994–1995. After accounting for that shift, the anomaly correlation coefficient for five-year forecasts is estimated to drop to 0.4, but remains statistically significant up to lead years 3–7. Most of the skill is shown to come from the ability of the forecast systems at capturing change in Atlantic sea surface temperature, although the failure of most systems at reproducing the observed slow down in warming over the tropics in recent years leads to an underestimation of hurricane activity in the later period.     

The Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland: An Outline of its History and Present Mapping Tasks

Abstract

This explains the formation of the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland as a separate institution in 1921, when it took over the map series which until that time had been part of the Ordnance Survey (U. K.) responsibility. As happened with many mapping organisations, replanning and reorganisation took place after 1945; this included a triangulation for Northern Ireland to provide a basis for a new Irt"sh Grid, and the introduction of the 1:1250 scale for major urban areas.

The technical problems of reproduction and revision are then considered, and details given for each of the main series.     

Assessing the visual impacts of new urban features: coupling visibility analysis with 3D city modelling

Abstract

Land use changes associated with urbanization often have negative impacts on scenic beauty. In this paper, we explore and compare the visual impact of two different scenarios of urban growth including historical urban growth (HUG) and aesthetically sound urban growth (AUG) with two different categories of height for buildings in the city of Gorgan, Iran. This was done by viewshed and landscape metric analysis of different viewpoints and 3D representation of each scenario. The results show that with the AUG scenario, viewsheds are less impacted by new developments than the HUG scenario in all the viewpoints. It can be concluded that building locations can considerably affect the landscape visibility while building height does not impact to the same degree as location. The results of this research, as a Spatial Decision Support System, would help the managers for better understanding of different patterns of urbanization and its effect on landscape view.     

The Technology of Religion: Mapping Religious Cyberscapes

This article combines geographical studies of both the Internet and religion in an analysis of where and how a variety of religious practices are represented in geotagged Web content. This method provides needed insight into the geography of virtual expressions of religion and highlights the mutually constitutive, and at times contradictory, relationship between the virtual and material dimensions of religious expression. By using the spatialities of religious practice and contestation as an example, this article argues that mappings of virtual representations of material practices are important tools for understanding how online activities simultaneously represent and reproduce the material world.     

An Overview of Spatial Analysis of Emerging Infectious Diseases

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are of increasing global concern, and quantitative geography can play an important role in integrating spatial data describing drivers of disease emergence and building models of EID risk. This article lays out the key issues of EIDs and describes problems and opportunities for integrative quantitative geography to inform on patterns of EIDs. Issues of data quality are highlighted, as are methods of spatial analysis and forms of research communication and visualization as they relate to the study of EIDs. Our review demonstrates that geography is critically needed in EID research, and many of the issues central to understanding and predicting EIDs are inherently of a geographical nature.     

Unravelling property relations around forest carbon

Market‐based interventions to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) enable the carbon stored in land and forests to be traded as a new and intangible form of property. Using examples from Cambodia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, we examine the property negotiations underpinning this new forest carbon economy. We show that the institutions and land use negotiations needed to ‘produce’ forest carbon interact recursively with existing property claims over land and forests. Even where customary rights are formally recognized (PNG, Philippines), claims to forest carbon are still complicated by ambiguities and complexities surrounding rights to forested land. Meanwhile the new value attached to forest carbon can stimulate efforts to appropriate land and forest resources associated with it, creating new power relations and property dynamics. This interplay between forest carbon and underlying contested property claims in rural forest settings creates an unstable basis for forest carbon markets and raises questions about future access to forested land.     

City generics: external urban relations in ancient-Mesopotamian and modern-global city networks

City generics is a research choice to explore continuities of urban process across time and space. Central flow theory is interpreted as generic and is operationalized using the interlocking network model. A nuanced generic approach is developed that respects differences in inter-city relations found in dissimilar social worlds, defined as world-systems. This is illustrated through the application of the interlocking network model to extremely different world-systems – the contemporary world-economy and the ancient Mesopotamian world-empire. In both cases data is collected and analysed to reveal a city network at the centre of societal reproduction; advanced producer services are enabling of corporate globalization through cities; advanced divine services are enabling of spiritual-political change through cities. Both analyses produce credible geographical results so that similarities and differences in results can be discussed as generic inter-city relations.     

Improvement of streams hydro‐geomorphological assessment using LiDAR DEMs

Hydro‐geomorphological assessments are an essential component for riverine management plans. They usually require costly and time‐consuming field surveys to characterize the spatial variability of key variables such as flow depth, width, discharge, water surface slope, grain size and unit stream power throughout the river corridor. The objective of this research is to develop automated tools for hydro‐geomorphological assessments using high‐resolution LiDAR digital elevation models (DEMs). More specifically, this paper aims at developing geographic information system (GIS) tools to extract channel slope, width and discharge from 1 m‐resolution LiDAR DEMs to estimate the spatial distribution of unit stream power in two contrasted watersheds in Quebec: a small agricultural stream (Des Fèves River) and a large gravel‐bed river (Matane River). For slope, the centreline extracted from the raw LiDAR DEM was resampled at a coarser resolution using the minimum elevation value. The channel width extraction algorithm progressively increased the centerline from the raw DEM until thresholds of elevation differences and slopes were reached. Based on the comparison with over 4000 differential global positioning system (GPS) measurements of the water surface collected in a 50 km reach of the Matane River, the longitudinal profile and slope estimates extracted from the raw and resampled LiDAR DEMs were in very good agreement with the field measurements (correlation coefficients ranging from 0 · 83 to 0 · 87) and can thus be used to compute stream power. The extracted width also corresponded very well to the channel as seen from ortho‐photos, although the presence of bars in the Matane River increased the level of error in width estimates. The estimated maximum unit stream power spatial patterns corresponded well with field evidence of bank erosion, indicating that LiDAR DEMs can be used with confidence for initial hydro‐geomorphological assessments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.