Early development of strike-slip faulting: palaeoseismic study along the Petersen Mountain fault,northern Walker Lane,Nevada

Characterising youthful strike-slip fault systems within transtensional regimes is often complicated by the presence of tectonic geomorphic features produced by normal faulting associated with oblique extension. The Petersen Mountain fault in the northern Walker Lane tectonic province exhibits evidence of both normal and strike-slip faulting. We present the results of geologic and geomorphic mapping, and palaeoseismic trenching that characterise the fault's style and sense of deformation. The fault consists of two major traces. The western trace displaces colluvial, landslide, and middle to late Pleistocene alluvial fans and is associated with aligned range front saddles, linear drainages, and oversteepened range front slopes. The eastern trace is associated with a low linear bedrock ridge, a narrow graben, right deflected stream channels, and scarps in late Pleistocene alluvial fan deposits. A trench on the eastern trace of the fault exposed a clear juxtaposition of disintegrated granodiorite bedrock against sand and boulder alluvial fan deposits across a steeply east-dipping fault. The stratigraphic evidence supports the occurrence of at least one late Pleistocene earthquake with a component of lateral displacement. As such, the Petersen Mountain fault accommodates part of the ~7 mm/yr of dextral shear distributed across the northern Walker Lane.     

On the dependence of the saturated hydraulic conductivity upon the effective porosity through a power law model at different scales

We study the scale dependence of the saturated hydraulic conductivity K_s through the effective porosity n_e by means of a newly developed power‐law model (PLM) which allows to use simultaneously measurements at different scales. The model is expressed as product between a single PLM (capturing the impact of the dominating scale) and a characteristic function κ^? accounting for the correction because of the other scale(s). The simple (closed form) expression of the κ^?‐function enables one to easily identify the scales which are relevant for K_s. The proposed model is then applied to a set of real data taken at the experimental site of Montalto Uffugo (Italy), and we show that in this case two (i.e. laboratory and field) scales appear to be the main ones. The implications toward an important application (solute transport) in Hydrology are finally discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A hydropedological approach to simulate streamflow and soil water contents with SWAT+

Reflecting internal catchment hydrological processes in hydrological models is important for accurate predictions of the impact of climate and land-use change on water resources. Characterizing these processes is however difficult and expensive due to their dynamic nature and spatio-temporal variability. Hydropedology is a relatively new discipline focusing on the synergistic integration of hydrology, soil physics and pedology. Hydropedological interpretations of soils and soil distribution can be used to characterize key hydrological processes, especially in areas with no or limited hydrometric measurements. Here we applied a hydropedological approach to reflect flowpaths through detailed routing in SWAT+ for a 157 ha catchment (Weatherley) in South Africa. We compared the hydropedological approach and a standard (no routing) approach against measured streamflow (two weirs) and soil water contents (13 locations). The catchment was treated as ‘ungauged’ and the model was not calibrated against hydrometric measurements in order to determine the direct contribution of hydropedology on modelling efficiency. Streamflow was predicted well without calibration (NSE > 0.8; R² > 0.82) for both approaches at both weirs. The standard approach yielded slightly better streamflow predictions. The hydropedological approach resulted in considerable improvements in the simulation of soil water contents (R² increased from 0.40 to 0.49 and PBIAS decreased from 40% to 20%). The routing capacity of SWAT+ as employed in the hydropedological approach reduced the underestimation of wetland water regimes drastically and resulted in a more accurate representation of the dominant hydrological processes in this catchment. We concluded that hydropedology can be a valuable source of ‘soft data’ to reflect internal catchment structure and processes and, potentially, for realistic calibrations in other studies, especially those conducted in areas with limited hydrometric measurements.     

Simulation of site-scale water fluxes in desert and natural oasis ecosystems of the arid region in Northwest China

The study of water fluxes is important to better understand hydrological cycles in arid regions. Data-driven machine learning models have been recently applied to water flux simulation. Previous studies have built site-scale simulation models of water fluxes for individual sites separately, requiring a large amount of data from each site and significant computation time. For arid areas, there is no consensus as to the optimal model and variable selection method to simulate water fluxes. Using data from seven flux observation sites in the arid region of Northwest China, this study compared the performance of random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), back propagation neural network (BPNN), and multiple linear regression (MLR) models in simulating water fluxes. Additionally, the study investigated inter-annual and seasonal variation in water fluxes and the dominant drivers of this variation at different sites. A universal simulation model for water flux was built using the RF approach and key variables as determined by MLR, incorporating data from all sites. Model performance of the SVM algorithm (R² = 0.25–0.90) was slightly worse than that of the RF algorithm (R² = 0.41–0.91); the BPNN algorithm performed poorly in most cases (R² = 0.15–0.88). Similarly, the MLR results were limited and unreliable (R² = 0.00–0.66). Using the universal RF model, annual water fluxes were found to be much higher than the precipitation received at each site, and natural oases showed higher fluxes than desert ecosystems. Water fluxes were highest during the growing season (May–September) and lowest during the non-growing season (October–April). Furthermore, the dominant drivers of water flux variation were various among different sites, but the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), soil moisture and soil temperature were important at most sites. This study provides useful insights for simulating water fluxes in desert and oasis ecosystems, understanding patterns of variation and the underlying mechanisms. Besides, these results can make a contribution as the decision-making basis to the water management in desert and oasis ecosystems.