A fully coupled numerical modeling to investigate the role of rock thermo-mechanical properties on reservoir uplifting in steam assisted gravity drainage

One of the crucial consequences of steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process is abnormal reservoir uplifting under thermal steam injection, which can significantly influence the reservoir rock deformation, specifically thin bed reservoirs and causes intensive failures and fractures into the cap rock formations. A thorough understanding of the influences of rock thermo-mechanical properties on reservoir uplifting plays an important role in preventing those aforementioned failures within design and optimization process in SAGD. In addition, coupling of reservoir porous medium and flowing of specific fluid with temperature as an additional degree of freedom with initial pore pressure and in-situ stress condition, are also very challenging parts of geomechanical coupled simulation which would be clearly explained. Thus, a fully coupled thermo-poro-elastic geomechanical model with finite element codes was performed in ABAQUS to investigate the role of rock thermo-mechanical parameters on reservoir vertical uplift during steam injection. It is clearly observed that, any increase in rock thermo-mechanical properties specifically rock’s thermal properties such as specific heat, thermal expansion, and formation’s thermal conductivity, have significant influences on reservoir uplift. So by coupling the temperature as an additional degree of freedom with the coupled pore-fluid stress and diffusion finite element model of SAGD process, the more realistic simulation will be conducted; hence, the errors related to not having heat as an additional degree of freedom will be diminished. In addition, Young’s modulus and specific heat are the rock thermo-mechanical parameters which have the maximum and minimum effects on the reservoir uplift, respectively.     

Structural pattern and emplacement mechanism of the Neka Valley nappe complex,eastern Alborz,Iran

International Journal of Earth Sciences - The Neka Valley nappe complex is exposed in the south of Gorgan County in the eastern Alborz fold-and-thrust belt. We use the results of a regional survey...     

Groundwater potential recharge estimation in bare soil using three soil moisture accounting models: field evaluation for a semi-arid foothill region

Performances of conventional and improved soil moisture balance as well as locally calibrated empirical models were evaluated in simulating potential recharge (R) and soil moisture content for a semi-arid foothill region. Models comparison with observed values using lysimeter data during [(2011–2012), (2012–2013)] reveal poor performance of conventional soil moisture balance model, underestimating annual R values. Improved soil moisture balance model provided acceptable estimation of annual R for 2011–2012 by considering the wetting of the near surface soil storage. However, it produced the worst simulation for daily soil moisture content once rainy season was over. Sensitivity analysis revealed that the precision degree of initial soil moisture deficit value would strongly influence estimation of R by improved soil moisture balance model, which can be viewed as a limiting factor. Additionally, locally calibrated model produced the best estimation of annual R and daily soil moisture content, which is suggested for the study region.     

Scour and flow field around a spur dike in a 90° bend

Spur dike is an important element in fiver training that creates rapid variations in flow field, sediment transport and bed topography. The mechanism of flow and sediment transport in a channel bend is very complex, especially when a spur dike is constructed in a bend. Most of previous investigations on flow behavior and scour around spur dike were carried out in straight channels. In this paper results of experiments on flow field and scour around a spur dike in a 90 degree channel bend are presented, Sand with uniform grain size was used as the bed material, Experiments were conducted for different locations and different lengths of spur dikes at the bend with different values of discharge, The three dimensional flow fields around a spur dike were investigated, The maximum depth of scour was correlated to the Froude numbers, lengths and the locations of spur dike in the bend.     

Simulating winter wheat production potential under near-future climate change in arid regions of northeast Iran

Theoretical and Applied Climatology - Water scarcity is the key challenge in arid regions, which exacerbates under climate change (CC) and must be considered to assess the impacts of CC on cropping...     

Measuring the relationships between landscape aesthetics suitability and spatial patterns of urbanized lands: an informed modelling framework for developing urban growth scenarios

This study develops an informed modelling approach that follows a bottom-up planning strategy to define plausible urban growth scenarios. In this case, landscape aesthetics suitability of the area was first generated using multi-criteria evaluation method. Then, a buffer zone of 1 km was considered to extract the average values of aesthetics suitability scores surrounding urban patches with medium physical size (10–30 hectares). The averaged values were considered as the dependent variable. In the next step, landscape metrics of these urban patches, as explanatory variables, were also computed to measure compositional and configuration-based attributes of urban clusters. Bivariate associations (Pearson correlation analysis) and statistical relationships (linear regression algorithm) between landscape metrics and their associated aesthetics values were measured and modelled. According to the results, both composition and configuration values are significantly correlated to the dependent variable in which configuration-based attributes depicted a stronger explanatory power.     

Modeling flood event characteristics using D-vine structures

The authors investigate the use of drawable (D-)vine structures to model the dependences existing among the main characteristics of a flood event, i.e., flood volume, flood peak, duration, and peak time. Firstly, different three- and four-dimensional probability distributions were built considering all the permutations of the conditioning variables. The Frank copula was used to model the dependence of each pair of variables. Then, the appropriate D-vine structures were selected using information criteria and a goodness-of-fit test. The influence of varying the data length on the selected D-vine structure was also investigated. Finally, flood event characteristics were simulated using the four-dimensional D-vine structure.     

Probabilistic Convective Initiation Nowcasting with Reduced Satellite - NWP Predictors over Iran

Geostationary satellites are able to nowcast Convective Initiation (CI) for the next 0–6 h. Compared to using satellite predictors only, the incorporation of satellite and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) predictors can provide the possibility to reduce false alarm rates in 0–1:30 Convective Initiation Nowcasting (COIN). However, the correlation among these predictors not only can cause error in COIN, but also increases the runtime. In this study for the first time, all effective predictors in Satellite Convection Analysis and Tracking version 2 (SATCASTv2) and NWP were applied over Iran from 22nd March 2015 to 9th January 2016. In applying SATCASTv2 over Iran, it was necessary to make some modifications to the algorithm, such as removing case specific thresholds of satellite predictors and rearranging COIN predictors. Then, SATCASTv2 was tested and evaluated with both the full and reduced set of predictors. The results suggested that using fixed thresholds for temporal difference predictors could miss COIN in some cases. To investigate the possibility of improving computational efficiency, a dimension reduction was conducted by Factor Analysis (FA) and the number of predictors was reduced from 22 to 11. The NWP-satellite, reduced NWP-satellite, and satellite predictors were used as input in Random Forest (RF), as a parametric machine learning method, for COIN evaluation. The Combination of NWP model and satellite predictors had lower false alarm rates in contrast with satellite predictors. This is in agreement with previous studies. The results from statistical metrics showed that the reduced NWP-satellite predictors had comparable performance to the NWP-satellite predictors over study area, but decreased the run time by almost 50%. The results indicated that Convective Inhibition (CIN) was the most significant predictor when the reduced set of predictors was used.     

On the relationship between MODIS Land Surface Temperature and topography in Iran

Land Surface Temperature (LST) is considered important in monitoring the energy flux between the land surface and atmosphere. Due to the diversity of topography in Iran and its effect on the climate diversity, we decided to study the effect of topography on the LST variations. To this end, the LST digital data derived from the observations of the MODIS Terra and Aqua were used. The results indicated that, during the daytime, from sea level up to a height of 400 meters, the LST increased, and then the temperature decreased with increasing altitude, and up to a height of 3000 meters, there was a strong correlation between the two. LST lapse rate was more during the daytime compared with that of the night time and it was more during the winter compared with the summer. LST lapse rate showed larger variability in diurnal cycle, but its monthly patterns were similar in different aspects. The aspect had substantial effect on LST inversion elevation. Furthermore, the inverse relationship between LST and slope was strong in slopes up to 20°.