Field experiments to improve the efficacy of gargoor (fish trap) fishery in Kuwait’s waters

Fish traps were investigated to understand the effects of season, bait type, trap size, and trap soak time on catch rates, catch composition, and trap loss rates from March 2004 to September 2005, to improve the performance and management of Kuwait’s gargoor (cage style fish trap) fishery, which used to be the nation’s most important one in terms of value and landings volume. Catch rates were the highest in April/May (5-8 kg/trap haul) and again in December (7 kg/trap haul). Bait type and trap size also affected catch rates and species composition. Of the seven baits tested, the best catch rates, >5 kg/trap haul, occurred with cuttlefish (Sepia pharaonis), but wolf-herring (Chirocentrus dorab) and mullet (Liza klunzingeri) also produced good results (4-5 kg/trap haul). Within the five tested sizes, the two largest-sized traps captured more fish and larger size fish. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed significant differences of catch rate among traps with different baits as well as among traps of different sizes. Duncan test further revealed these differences between two specific baits and sizes. Cluster Analysis of species composition showed more differences among different baits than among different trap sizes. Longer soak times did not result in larger catch rates, but increased trap loss. About 10-day soak time resulted in trap loss 7%, while 40-day soak time could result in a loss of around 20%. Consequently, it is recommended that the gargoor be checked every 10 or fewer days. The average overall catch rate during the study period was lower than that of 1980s (4.5 vs. 5.8 kg/trap haul), indicating a possible decline of fish abundance in Kuwait’s waters. It is recommended that the number of gargoor fishing boats and gargoors from each boat should be limited to allow stock rehabilitation.     

Seismotectonics and consequences of the 1930s large earthquakes in eastern Mazandaran,north of Iran

Early in the 1930s,two relatively large earthquakes (Kosout,magnitude 6.8,and Talarrud,magnitude 5.8) shook the eastern Mazandaran,northern Iran.Despite the his...     

Thermal instability and the effects of cosmic-ray diffusion

We study the dynamical effects of cosmic rays (CRs) on thermal instability in the linear regime. CRs and the thermal plasma are treated as two different interacting fluids, in which CRs can diffuse along the magnetic field lines. We show that the growth rate of the magnetothermal condensation mode is reduced because of the existence of CRs, and this stabilizing effect depends on the diffusion coefficient and the ratio of CR pressure to gas pressure. Thus, a slower rate of structure formation via thermal instability is predicted when CRs are considered.     

Geochemistry and mineral chemistry of pyroxenite xenoliths and host volcanic alkaline rocks from north west of Marand (NW Iran)

Mineralogy and Petrology - The Plio-Quaternary alkaline volcanic rocks from the northwest of Marand (NW Iran) consist of trachy-andesites, trachy-basaltic andesites, leucite-tephrites and...     

A simple two-step method for spatio-temporal design-based balanced sampling

We introduce a two-step method to perform spatio-temporal balanced sampling in a design-based approach. For populations with spatio-temporal trends and with anisotropic effects in the variable of interest, the prediction can be further improved by selecting samples that are well spread over the entire population in space and time. We control the spread of the sample over the population by using the volume of the corresponding three-dimensional Voronoi tessellation. Indeed, spatio-temporal design-based balanced sampling is even more efficient under the presence of a trend and anisotropic effects. We present an intensive simulation study comparing our method to other available methods for spatio-temporal sampling. Finally, we analyze real data by sampling from a population of temperature stations over six European countries.     

Ground-motion models for average spectral acceleration in a period range: direct and indirect methods

Average spectral acceleration, AvgSA, is defined as the geometric mean of spectral acceleration values over a range of periods and it is a ground motion intensity measure used for structural response prediction. One of its advantages stands on the assumption that its distribution is computable from the available GMPEs for spectral acceleration, GMPE-SA, (called here indirect method) without the need for deriving new specific GMPEs for AvgSA, GMPE-AvgSA, (called here direct method). To what extent this assumption is valid, however, has never been verified. As such, we derived an empirical GMPE-AvgSA based on RESORCE ground motion dataset and we compared its predicted values with those from a GMPE-SA via the indirect approach. As expected, the results show that the indirect approach yields median AvgSA estimates that are identical to those of the direct approach. However, the estimates of AvgSA variance of the two methods are identical only if both the GMPE-SA and their empirical correlation coefficients among different SA ordinates are derived from the same record dataset.     

Mainshock-consistent ground motion record selection for aftershock sequences

In recent years, the additional risk posed to the built environment due to aftershock sequences and triggered events has been brought to attention, and several efforts have been directed towards developing fragility functions for structures in damaged conditions. Despite this rise of interest, a rather fundamental component for such tasks, namely that of aftershock ground motion record selection, has remained under-scrutinized. Herein, we propose a pragmatic procedure that can be applied for the selection of mainshock-aftershock ground motion pairs using consistent causal parameters and accounting for the correlation between their spectral accelerations. In addition, a structural analysis strategy that can be employed for the analytical derivation of damage-dependent fragility functions is outlined and presented through a case study. A more conventional back-to-back IDA analysis is also carried out in order to compare the derived damage-dependent fragility functions with the ones obtained with the proposed procedure. The results indicate that record selection remains a crucial factor even when assessing the structural vulnerability of damaged buildings, and should thus be treated cautiously.     

Rayleigh wave separation using high-resolution time-frequency polarization filter

Obtaining geological information from seismic data motivates researchers to innovate and improve seismic wave processing tools. Polarization-based methods have received much attention regarding their ability to discriminate between different phases of the seismic wave based on polarity. Combining the intuitive definition of polarity in the frequency domain (monochromatic waves) with the non-stationary properties provided by time-domain methods, time-frequency approaches are attracting widespread interest because they localize the information extracted from the seismic waves in the joint time and frequency domains. Due to the lack of high-resolution time-frequency maps, the time-frequency polarization approach was not able to resolve specific temporal polarity changes in the seismic signal. The main objective of this study was to devise a robust time-frequency-based polarization filtering method using high-resolution polarization attributes obtained directly from the sparse time-frequency map without using Eigen analysis or analytic signals. The method proposed here utilizes a computationally effective sparsity-based adaptive S-transform to obtain a high-resolution polarization map of an inherently non-stationary seismogram for the entire frequency content of the signal at different times. The superiority of the proposed method over the S-transform method was verified using synthetic and real data sets to calculate the polarization attributes in the time-frequency domain and separate the Rayleigh waves from the seismogram.