Size and spatial distribution of loess slides on the Chinese Loess Plateau

ABSTRACT

The size and spatial distribution of loess slides are important for estimating the yield of eroded materials and determining the landslide risk. While previous studies have investigated landslide size distributions, the spatial distribution pattern of landslides at different spatial scales is poorly understood. The results indicate that the loess slide distribution exhibits a power-law scaling across a range of the size distribution. The mean landslide size and size distribution in the different geomorphic types are different. The double Pareto and inverse gamma functions can coincide well with the empirical probability distribution of the loess slide areas and can quantitatively reveal the rollover location, maximum probability, and scaling exponents. The frequency of loess slides increases with mean monthly precipitation. Moreover, point distance analysis showed that > 80% of landslides are located < 3 km from other loess slides. We found that the loess slides at the two study sites (Zhidan and Luochuan County) in northern Shaanxi Province, China show a significant clustered distribution. Furthermore, analysis results of the correlated fractal dimension show that the landslides exhibit a dispersed distribution at smaller spatial scales and a clustered distribution at larger spatial scales.     

Theoretical and experimental study of breaking wave on sloping bottoms

This paper studies the continuous evolution of breaking wave for the surface water waves propagating on a sloping beach. A Lagrangian asymptotic solution is derived. According to the solution coupled with the wave breaking criteria and the equations of water particles motion, the wave deformation and the continuous wave breaking processes for the progressive water waves propagating on a sloping bottom can be derived. A series of experiments are also conducted to compare with the theoretical solution. The results show that the present solution can reasonably describe the plunging or spilling wave breaking phenomenon.     

An asynchronous Geoprocessing Workflow and its application to an Antarctic ozone monitoring and mapping service

The integration of Sensor Web Enablement services with other Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services as Geospatial Processing Workflows (GPW) is essential for future Sensor Web application scenarios. With the help of GPW technology, distributed and heterogeneous OGC Web Services can be organized and integrated as compound Web Service applications that can direct complicated earth observation tasks. Under the Sensor Web environment, asynchronous communications between Sensor Web Services are common. We have proposed an asynchronous GPW architecture for the integration of Sensor Web Services into a Web Service Business Process Execution Language workflow technology. We designed a Sensor Information Accessing and Processing workflow, an asynchronous GPW instance, to take an experiment of observing and mapping ozone over Antarctica. Based on our results, our proposed asynchronous workflow method shows the advantages of taking environmental monitoring and mapping tasks.     

A global assessment of the impact of climate change on water scarcity

This paper presents a global scale assessment of the impact of climate change on water scarcity. Patterns of climate change from 21 Global Climate Models (GCMs) under four SRES scenarios are applied to a global hydrological model to estimate water resources across 1339 watersheds. The Water Crowding Index (WCI) and the Water Stress Index (WSI) are used to calculate exposure to increases and decreases in global water scarcity due to climate change. 1.6 (WCI) and 2.4 (WSI) billion people are estimated to be currently living within watersheds exposed to water scarcity. Using the WCI, by 2050 under the A1B scenario, 0.5 to 3.1 billion people are exposed to an increase in water scarcity due to climate change (range across 21 GCMs). This represents a higher upper-estimate than previous assessments because scenarios are constructed from a wider range of GCMs. A substantial proportion of the uncertainty in the global-scale effect of climate change on water scarcity is due to uncertainty in the estimates for South Asia and East Asia. Sensitivity to the WCI and WSI thresholds that define water scarcity can be comparable to the sensitivity to climate change pattern. More of the world will see an increase in exposure to water scarcity than a decrease due to climate change but this is not consistent across all climate change patterns. Additionally, investigation of the effects of a set of prescribed global mean temperature change scenarios show rapid increases in water scarcity due to climate change across many regions of the globe, up to 2 °C, followed by stabilisation to 4 °C.