Sediment yield estimation formulations for arid regions

Previous studies lack proper and quick assessment of sediment yield rates in arid regions. Sediment yield at a point along the main channel of a drainage basin is an integrated result of upland, gully, and channel erosion, transportation, and depositional processes. The external dynamic agents of sediment yield are water, wind, gravity, temperature change, ice, and biological activities. Although each may be important in arid regions, at locations, occasionally present-day hydrological cycle works water are the most widespread agent of erosion and account for the bulk of sediment yield. This paper focuses on sediment yield formulations in arid regions in terms of little morphology in addition to the runoff discharge after a storm rainfall. Among the morphological variables are the drainage basin area, main channel slope, and the drainage density. Hence, the channel head is represented by the combination of drainage area and the slope. The emphasis is given to the determination of simple and straightforward sediment yield rate formulations by dimensional analysis technique. Three simple formulations are derived, and two of them are applied to one of the largest wadis, Wadi Baysh, with its 54 sub-basins, in the southwestern Saudi Arabia.     

Structures and detrital zircon ages of the Devonian–Permian Tarbagatay accretionary complex in west Junggar,China: imbricated ocean plate stratigraphy and implications for amalgamation of the CAOB

ABSTRACT

The Tarbagatay Complex, located in northwest Junggar, is situated tectonically between the Zharma–Saur arc to the north and the Tacheng terrane and the Boshchekol–Chingiz arc to the south. This Complex belt is variably composed of ophiolitic mélange, sedimentary mélange, and coherent units of turbidites and shallow water sediments. These rocks crop out in fault-bound slices with fault-parallel asymmetric folds. Both the lithologies and deformation features of the Tarbagatay Complex suggest an accretionary origin generally with a top-to-the-south tectonic vergence, suggesting N-dipping subduction beneath the Zharma–Saur arc. The presence of a former ocean is indicated by the Ordovician ophiolite mélanges and related marine fossils. The time duration of the Tarbagatay Complex can be bracketed by detrital zircon ages of turbidites and shallow water sediments with a lower limit of major peak ages of 350–370 Ma, and an upper limit of middle Permian indicated by detrital zircon ages of 262.3 Ma. Based on these data, we suggest that the subduction of the Tarbagatay Ocean likely started in the Late Devonian and lasted until the middle Permian. Taking into account the formation of the northern part of the Kazakhstan orocline, which has a similar temporal-spatial framework, we propose a tectonic model for the western CAOB that involves accretion and amalgamation from the Ordovician to the middle Permian.     

Stable isotopic and elemental characteristics of recent tufa from a karstic Krka River (south‐east Slovenia): useful environmental proxies?

Tufa samples from 16 consecutive barrages along a 13 km section of the groundwater‐fed Krka River (Slovenia) were analysed for their petrographical, mineralogical, elemental and stable carbon (δ¹³C) and oxygen (δ¹⁸O) isotope composition, to establish their relation to current climatic and hydrological conditions. Waters constantly oversaturated with calcite and the steep morphology of the Krka riverbed stimulate rapid CO₂ degassing and subsequent tufa precipitation. The carbon isotope fractionation (Δ¹³C) between dissolved inorganic carbon and tufa in the Krka River evolves towards isotopic equilibrium being controlled by continuous CO₂ degassing and tufa precipitation rate downstream. The Δ¹³C increased from 1·9 to 2·5‰ (VPDB); however, since tufa precipitation rates remain similar downstream, the major controlling factor of carbon isotope exchange is most probably related to the continuous ¹²CO₂ degassing downstream leaving the carbon pool enriched in ¹³C. In the case of oxygen, the isotope fractionation (Δ¹⁸O) was found to be from 1·0 to 2·3‰ (VSMOW) smaller than reported in the literature. The observed discrepancies are due to different precipitation rates of calcite deposits because Krka tufas on cascades grow relatively faster compared to slowly precipitated calcite deposits in cave or stream pools. Due to non‐equilibrium oxygen isotope exchange between Krka tufa and water, the δ¹⁸O proxy showed from 1·2 to 8·2°C higher calculated water temperatures compared to measured water temperatures, demonstrating that δ¹⁸O proxy‐based temperature equations are not reliable for water temperature calculations of fast‐growing tufa on cascades. Because Mg is bound to the terrigenous dolomite fraction in the Krka tufa samples, the Mg/Ca was also found to be an unreliable temperature proxy yielding over up to 20°C higher calculated water temperatures.     

Long-lasting Cadomian magmatic activity along an active northern Gondwana margin: U–Pb zircon and Sr–Nd isotopic evidence from the Brunovistulian Domain,eastern Bohemian Massif

International Journal of Earth Sciences - Cadomian magmatic complexes of the Brunovistulian Domain crop out at the eastern termination of the Bohemian Massif. However, the age, nature and...     

Weighted Pivot Coordinates for Compositional Data and Their Application to Geochemical Mapping

The log ratio methodology converts compositional data, such as concentrations of chemical elements in a rock, from their original Aitchison geometry to interpretable real orthonormal coordinates, thereby allowing meaningful statistical processing and visualization. However, it must be taken into account that the original concentrations can be flawed by detection limit or imprecision problems that can severely affect the resulting coordinates. This paper aims to construct such orthonormal log ratio coordinates, called weighted pivot coordinates, that capture the relevant relative information about an original component and treat the redundant information in a controlled manner. Theoretical developments are supported by a thorough simulation study. Weighted pivot coordinates are then applied to the geochemical mapping of catchment outlet sediments from the National Geochemical Survey of Australia illustrating their advantage over possible alternatives.     

Probabilistic Formulation of Spatio-temporal Drought Pattern

Summary Meteorological and hydrological drought occurrences along time and space take place randomly and therefore their scientific quantifications are possible by the probabilistic methods. Herein drought occurrences are assumed to have spatial and temporal stationarity with underlying independent generating mechanism. The drought stricken area is considered as composed of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subareas each with different probability of drought occurrence. Two types of spatio-temporal drought formulations are presented. The first is referred to as the regional persistence model and it assumes that if any subarea is stricken by drougth it will remain to stay in this state till the whole area is covered by drought. The second alternative is multi-seasonal model and it is based on the assumption that drought stricken area might recover and have wet period during the course of time. The necessary theoretical probability distribution functions for partially drought stricken areas are derived based on the Bernoulli trials both along time and space axis. The expectation and variance parameters are derived based on the percentage of drought stricken area and the basic wet and dry spell probabilities. Necessary charts for practical purposes are prepared and interpretations are given. Received January 23, 1998 Revised June 30, 1998     

Precipitation projections under GCMs perspective and Turkish Water Foundation (TWF) statistical downscaling model procedures

Insect outbreaks are major disturbances that affect a land area similar to that of forest fires across North America. The recent mountain pine bark beetle (D endroctonus ponderosae) outbreak and its associated blue stain fungi (Grosmannia clavigera) are impacting water partitioning processes of forests in the Rocky Mountain region as the spatially heterogeneous disturbance spreads across the landscape. Water cycling may dramatically change due to increasing spatial heterogeneity from uneven mortality. Water and energy storage within trees and soils may also decrease, due to hydraulic failure and mortality caused by blue stain fungi followed by shifts in the water budget. This forest disturbance was unique in comparison to fire or timber harvesting because water fluxes were altered before significant structural change occurred to the canopy. We investigated the impacts of bark beetles on lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) stand and ecosystem level hydrologic processes and the resulting vertical and horizontal spatial variability in energy storage. Bark beetle-impacted stands had on average 57 % higher soil moisture, 1.5 °C higher soil temperature, and 0.8 °C higher tree bole temperature over four growing seasons compared to unimpacted stands. Seasonal latent heat flux was highly correlated with soil moisture. Thus, high mortality levels led to an increase in ecosystem level Bowen ratio as sensible heat fluxes increased yearly and latent heat fluxes varied with soil moisture levels. Decline in canopy biomass (leaf, stem, and branch) was not seen, but ground-to-atmosphere longwave radiation flux increased, as the ground surface was a larger component of the longwave radiation. Variability in soil, latent, and sensible heat flux and radiation measurements increased during the disturbance. Accounting for stand level variability in water and energy fluxes will provide a method to quantify potential drivers of ecosystem processes and services as well as lead to greater confidence in measurements for all dynamic disturbances.     

Stochastic Modeling of the Van Lake Monthly Level Fluctuations in Turkey

Summary  Planning, design, construction and operation of lakeshore structures require information about the future likely extremes of the lake levels at a given risk percentage. Alternative future likely synthetic sequences can be numerically generated provided that the underlying generating mechanism of the lake level fluctuation phenomenon is identified. Simple linear and periodic nonlinear models are used for modeling the deterministic part in the lake level records. Linear trend is eliminated from the original lake level historic data by regression line technique. The nonlinear part needs two stages for its identification. First Fourier series is applied to model interannual periodicities in the lake level fluctuation series and then monthly standardization procedure is applied for seasonal periodic nonlinear component modeling. A second order Markov model is found suitable for the remaining stochastic parts. The application of the methodology is presented for the Lake Van monthly level data in eastern Turkey. Suitable models are identified and their parameters are estimated for trend, periodic and stochastic parts. Likely, synthetic lake levels are generated by the stochastic model and hence lake level extreme values are depicted for the next 2, 6, 12, 24, 60 and 120 months with risk calculations. Such risk calculations take into account the stochastic characteristics of the lake level fluctuations only. The deterministic parts as linear trends and periodicities are added to the stochastic extreme events for the actual simulation of the lake levels. The model presented in this paper is not for time prediction of future lake levels but rather for the simulation of possible equally likely extreme lake level value occurrences over any desired future period. Received April 22, 1998/Revised July 28, 1999     

ERA-40-aided assessment of the atmospheric influence on satellite retrieval of Adriatic Sea surface temperature

The aim of this work is assessment of regional atmospheric influence on satellite derivation of Adriatic Sea surface temperature (SST). To this end the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) ERA-40 reanalysis dataset has been employed to provide the temperature and humidity profiles and surface data, while the RTTOV 8.7 radiative transfer model was used to calculate the top-of-atmosphere brightness temperatures for the advanced very high-resolution radiometer (AVHRR) channels. Ten ERA-40 grid points over the Adriatic Sea were used in the analysis, providing 29,590, 00 UTC and 12 UTC, clear-sky profiles. Climatological analysis of the ERA-40 profiles demonstrated distinct seasonal variability over the Adriatic Sea. Seasonality noted in the temperature and specific humidity profiles also evinced in the atmospheric transmittance, thermal channels temperature deficit, and derived γ and ρ parameters. A multivariate analysis was applied to relate the simulated top-of-atmosphere brightness temperatures to the Adriatic SSTs in order to generate exploratory sets of SST retrieval coefficients. All derived coefficient sets exhibited smaller noise amplification factor than the global counterpart. A test comparison of satellite-derived SST with an 11-month in situ SST series showed than locally derived coefficients provide smaller scatter (improved precision), and skin-centred bias that requires additional adjustment. Almost identical SST residual and error metric was obtained with seasonally adjusted classical split-window coefficients and with coefficients explicitly accommodating water-vapor dependence. Comparison with data reinforces the notion that the atmosphere over the Adriatic may exhibit variability that cannot be fully accommodated by globally adjusted correction.     

Structure analysis of geopolymers synthesized from clay originated from Serbia

The paper presents chemical and structural analysis of geopolymer materials which are obtained by alkali-activated calcined clay (metakaolin) originated from Serbia under strictly defined conditions. Characterization of the metakaolin and geopolymers molecular structure has been done using X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The paper presents the possibility of obtaining geopolymer structure and differences in chemical and structural characterization of these materials taking into account the concentration of NaOH as a variable parameter. The results of MALDI analysis of metakaolin and synthesized geopolymer structures using various matrix system: 2,4,6 trihydroxyacetophenone (THAP), α-cyano-4-hydroxycinnamic, 2,6 dihydroxyacetophenone and laser desorption/ionization, have shown that THAP matrix is the most appropriate for analysing these aluminosilicate materials.