Mixture distributions - an alternative approach for estimating maximum magnitude earthquake occurrence

Summary. Gumbel's theory of extreme value has been employed in the statistical forecasting of maximum-magnitude earthquake occurrence. The basic working hypothesis behind this method assumes that observations follow either Gumbel type I or type III asymptotic distributions. In certain cases, however, it is found that neither type of distribution fits the data well enough to produce accurate parameter-estimates, particularly in the larger earthquake range. This article proposes an alternative approach based on finite-mixture distributions whereby a more realistic prediction of upper earthquake magnitudes (at given return periods) is expected using a combined analysis of both Gumbel types I and III extremal distributions.     

A comparative study of various commercially available programs in slope stability analysis

The objective of this paper is to study the effect of different slip surface search techniques on the factors of safety obtained using the limit equilibrium (LE) slope stability methods. This objective is accomplished by comparing results from the finite element method, the linear grid method, the rectangular grid method, and the Monte-Carlo searching techniques using different commercially available programs. The results showed that the LE methods are very efficient methods when coupled with a robust searching technique namely the Monte-Carlo method. In addition, the selected slip surface search technique highly influenced the location of the critical slip surfaces as well as the value of the calculated factors of safety.     

Assessing the suitability of GlobeLand30 for mapping land cover in Germany

Global land cover (LC) maps have been widely employed as the base layer for a number of applications including climate change, food security, water quality, biodiversity, change detection, and environmental planning. Due to the importance of LC, there is a pressing need to increase the temporal and spatial resolution of global LC maps. A recent advance in this direction has been the GlobeLand30 dataset derived from Landsat imagery, which has been developed by the National Geomatics Center of China (NGCC). Although overall accuracy is greater than 80%, the NGCC would like help in assessing the accuracy of the product in different regions of the world. To assist in this process, this study compares the GlobeLand30 product with existing public and online datasets, that is, CORINE, Urban Atlas (UA), OpenStreetMap, and ATKIS for Germany in order to assess overall and per class agreement. The results of the analysis reveal high agreement of up to 92% between these datasets and GlobeLand30 but that large disagreements for certain classes are evident, in particular wetlands. However, overall, GlobeLand30 is shown to be a useful product for characterizing LC in Germany, and paves the way for further regional and national validation efforts.     

Changing land use/land cover patterns and growing human population in Wular catchment of Kashmir Valley,India

GeoJournal - The profound increase in human activities and the degrading scenario in fragile ecosystems of the western Himalayas like that of Wular Lake have highlighted the need to analyze the...     

Characterizing and monitoring global landscapes using GlobeLand30 datasets: the first decade of the twenty-first century

Global land cover maps are important sources of information for a wide range of studies including land change analysis and climate change research. While the global land cover maps attempt to present a consistent and homogenous data in terms of the production process, the existing datasets offer coarse resolution data, e.g. 1000 m for IGBP DISCover and 300 m for GlobeCover 2009 that is oftentimes challenging. Recently, GlobeLand30 data based on Landsat archive for two timestamps of 2000 and 2010 has been released. It presents a finer spatial resolution of 30 m, which provides numerous opportunities for a wide range of studies. The main objective of this study is to use this dataset for characterizing global land cover patterns, monitoring, and identifying extreme land change cases with their types and magnitude. The findings reveal massive land change patterns including deforestation, desertification, shrinkage of water bodies, and urbanization across the globe. The results and discussions of this research can help policy-makers, environmental planners, ecosystem services providers and climate change researchers to gain finer insights about the forms of global land change. Future research calls for further investigation of the underlying causes of the massive changes and their consequences on our ecosystems and human populations.     

Improvement of groundwater resources potential by artificial recharge technique: A case study of Charf El Akab aquifer in the Tangier region,Morocco

In arid and semi-arid zones,water is the most vulnerable resource to climate change.In fact,various techniques such as artificial recharge are adopted to restore aquifers and to ensure aquifer sustainability in relation to the accelerated pace of exploitation.Morocco is a Mediterranean country highly vulnerable to climate change,many of its main aquifers are subjected to excessive drawdowns.This technique is practiced to increase potentiality of these aquifers.In the Northwestern area of Morocco,the significant development experienced by Tangier City in the industrial,tourism,and commercial sectors will lead to increased water requirements-up to 5 067 L/s(159.8 mm^3)by 2030.However,the Charf El Akab aquifer system,subject to artificial recharge,is the only groundwater resource of Tangier region;hence,a rational management context is needed to ensure aquifer sustainability,and optimized exploitation under the background of differing constraints,such as increased water requirements,and climate change impacts.This work aims to respond,for the first time,to the Charf El Akab aquifer overexploitation problem,and to evaluate the future scenarios of its exploitation in the event of failure of one of the superficial resources.This work also presents a synthesized hydrodynamic modeling based on the results of the numerical simulations carried out using Feflow software for 2004(date of cessation of injections)and 2011(date of resumption of these facilities),making it possible to evaluate the impact of the artificial recharge on the piezometric level of the aquifer on a spatiotemporal scale.Finally,the exploitation scenarios have shown that the aquifer of Charf El Akab will not adequatly provide for the region's water requirements on the future horizon,entailing an optimal management of water resources in the region and an intentionally increased recharge rate.     

Mechanical response of saturated and unsaturated gravels of different sizes in drained triaxial testing

Acta Geotechnica - During the construction of pavements, gravelly soil is used as the main material in the base and sub-base layers. Predicting the deformation behaviour of gravelly soil has been...     

A combined methodology of multiplet and composite focal mechanism techniques for identifying seismologically active zones in Syria

This contribution is an attempt to enlarge the current knowledge about the focal mechanisms as well as the seismotectonic settings in Syria. The seismologically active zones have been identified by applying an appropriate methodology to the events recorded during the period 1995–2003 by the Syrian National Seismological Network (SNSN). The recorded events in Syria were classified as weak during the research period. It was extremely important to propose and apply an appropriate methodology to identify the focal mechanisms generating this seismic activity. The proposed methodology consists of applying a combination of two techniques: the multiplet and the composite focal mechanisms. The combination of many events in one composite focal mechanism was realized by a multiplet technique using the spectral coherence of the events as a measure of similarity. The application of the proposed methodology allows a data set of composite fault plane solutions to be obtained. Most of the composite fault plane solutions had strike-slip mechanisms which are in agreement with the configuration of seismogenic belts in Syria.