Sediment pollution in the Vågen,Bergen harbour,Norway

Recent sediments in the Vågen, Bergen harbour, are subjected to injection of untreated sewage from around 15,000 person equivalent. Here the distribution of trace elements is mapped in surface and subsurface sediments. Selected trace-element concentrations decrease from the inner towards the outer Vågen. These concentration gradients do not correlate with minerogenic grain size. Linear correlation, combined with enriched sediment trace elements, are used to infer sources for these elements and possible reasons for their enrichment. (1) Frequent use of dental amalgam might be related to the enrichments of and correlation between Ag, Cu, Hg and Sn in surficial sediments pre-1994. (2) Enrichment and correlation of Cu/Zn may be related to the commercial and private use of anti-fouling boat-paint. Further, tributyltin is suggested as a source of Sn enrichment. (3) Increased traffic in the city of Bergen with gasoline combustion and car-wheel wear-off release Pb and Zn. (4) Hg and Pb might have been atmospherically supplied due to the combustion of coal in a nearby gas plant pre-1985. (5) No correlation is observed between enriched Vågen trace metals and bedrock element composition of the surrounding mountains, indicating a minor supply from erosion.     

Large-offset approximation to seismic reflection traveltimes

Conventional approximations of reflection traveltimes assume a small offset-to-depth ratio, and their accuracy decreases with increasing offset-to-depth ratio. Hence, they are not suitable for velocity analysis and stacking of long-offset reflection seismic data. Assuming that the offset is large, rather than small, we present a new traveltime approximation which is exact at infinite offset and has a decreasing accuracy with decreasing offset-to-depth ratio. This approximation has the form of a series containing powers of the offset from 1 to −∞. It is particularly accurate in the presence of a thin high-velocity layer above the reflector, i.e. in a situation where the accuracy of the Taner and Koehler series is poor. This new series can be used to gain insight into the velocity information contained in reflection traveltimes at large offsets, and possibly to improve velocity analysis and stacking of long-offset reflection seismic data.     

Sedimentary indications and absolute chronology of Holocene relative sea‐level changes retrieved from coastal lagoon deposits on Samsø, Denmark

Coastal lagoons are a typical feature of the landscape in central Denmark. The lagoons formed when basins within the inherited glacial topography were flooded by the mid‐Holocene sea‐level rise. The transgression initiated coastal geomorphological processes and prompted marine sedimentation in the inundated areas. Despite their common occurrence and wide distribution in the area, coastal lagoons and their deposits have rarely been studied as sedimentary archives. The absolute chronology established for the basal marine deposits in sediment cores retrieved from coastal lagoons on the island of Samsø, southern Kattegat Sea, central Denmark, is evidence of a nearly synchronous onset of marine sedimentation at different elevations. This is interpreted as a new indication of a period of very rapid relative sea‐level (RSL) rise between 7.6 and 7.2 ka BP. Following a period of RSL highstand, a marked facies change in the deposits from an inactive lagoon yields consistent ages of around 4.1 ka BP and may be an indication of a marked RSL fall. This study illustrates the potential of coastal lagoons as sedimentary archives for the reconstruction of RSL in SW Scandinavia and in similar coastal environments elsewhere.     

Environmental toxicology: population modeling of cod larvae shows high sensitivity to loss of zooplankton prey

Two factors determine whether pollution is likely to affect a population indirectly through loss of prey: firstly, the sensitivity of the prey to the pollutants, and secondly, the sensitivity of the predator population to loss of prey at the given life stage. We here apply a statistical recruitment model for Northeast Arctic cod to evaluate the sensitivity of cod cohorts to loss of zooplankton prey, for example following an oil spill. The calculations show that cod cohorts are highly sensitive to possible zooplankton biomass reductions in the distribution area of the cod larvae, and point to a need for more knowledge about oil-effects on zooplankton. Our study illustrates how knowledge about population dynamics may guide which indirect effects to consider in environmental impact studies.     

Bridging the ensemble Kalman filter and particle filters: the adaptive Gaussian mixture filter

The nonlinear filtering problem occurs in many scientific areas. Sequential Monte Carlo solutions with the correct asymptotic behavior such as particle filters exist, but they are computationally too expensive when working with high-dimensional systems. The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is a more robust method that has shown promising results with a small sample size, but the samples are not guaranteed to come from the true posterior distribution. By approximating the model error with a Gaussian distribution, one may represent the posterior distribution as a sum of Gaussian kernels. The resulting Gaussian mixture filter has the advantage of both a local Kalman type correction and the weighting/resampling step of a particle filter. The Gaussian mixture approximation relies on a bandwidth parameter which often has to be kept quite large in order to avoid a weight collapse in high dimensions. As a result, the Kalman correction is too large to capture highly non-Gaussian posterior distributions. In this paper, we have extended the Gaussian mixture filter (Hoteit et al., Mon Weather Rev 136:317–334, 2008) and also made the connection to particle filters more transparent. In particular, we introduce a tuning parameter for the importance weights. In the last part of the paper, we have performed a simulation experiment with the Lorenz40 model where our method has been compared to the EnKF and a full implementation of a particle filter. The results clearly indicate that the new method has advantages compared to the standard EnKF.     

A modified randomized maximum likelihood for improved Bayesian history matching

Randomized maximum likelihood is known in the petroleum reservoir community as a Bayesian history matching technique by means of minimizing a stochastic quadratic objective function. The algorithm is well established and has shown promising results in several applications. For linear models with linear observation operator, the algorithm samples the posterior density accurately. To improve the sampling for nonlinear models, we introduce a generalized version in its simplest form by re-weighting the prior. The weight term is motivated by a sufficiency condition on the expected gradient of the objective function. Recently, an ensemble version of the algorithm was proposed which can be implemented with any simulator. Unfortunately, the method has some practical implementation issues due to computation of low rank pseudo inverse matrices and in practice only the data mismatch part of the objective function is maintained. Here, we take advantage of the fact that the measurement space is often much smaller than the parameter space and project the prior uncertainty from the parameter space to the measurement space to avoid over fitting of data. The proposed algorithms show good performance on synthetic test cases including a 2D reservoir model.     

Management alternatives to offset climate change effects on Mediterranean fire regimes in NE Spain

Fire regime is affected by climate and human settlements. In the Mediterranean, the predicted climate change is likely to exacerbate fire prone weather conditions, but the mid- to long-term impact of climate change on fire regime is not easily predictable. A negative feedback via fuel reduction, for instance, might cause a non-linear response of burned area to fire weather. Also, the number of fires escaping initial control could grow dramatically if the fire meteorology is just slightly more severe than what fire brigades are prepared for. Humans can directly influence fire regimes through ignition frequency, fire suppression and land use management. Here we use the fire regime model FIRE LADY to assess the impacts of climate change and local management options on number of fires, burned area, fraction of area burned in large fires and forest area during the twenty-first century in three regions of NE Spain. Our results show that currently fuel-humidity limited regions could suffer a drastic shift of fire regime with an up to 8 fold increase of annual burned area, due to a combination of fuel accumulation and severe fire weather, which would result in a period of unusually large fires. The impact of climate change on fire regime is predicted to be less pronounced in drier areas, with a gradual increase of burned area. Local fire prevention strategies could reduce but not totally offset climate induced changes in fire regimes. According to our model, a combination of restoring the traditional rural mosaic and classical fire prevention would be the most effective strategy, as a lower ignition frequency reduces the number of fires and the creation of agricultural fields in marginal areas reduces their extent.     

Assimilation of SLA and SST data into an OGCM for the Indian Ocean

 Remotely sensed observations of sea-level anomaly and sea-surface temperature have been assimilated into an implementation of the Miami Isopycnic Coordinate Ocean Model (MICOM) for the Indian Ocean using the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF). The system has been applied in a hindcast validation experiment to examine the properties of the assimilation scheme when used with a full ocean general circulation model and real observations. This work is considered as a first step towards an operational ocean monitoring and forecasting system for the Indian Ocean. The assimilation of real data has demonstrated that the sequential EnKF can efficiently control the model evolution in time. The use of data assimilation requires a significant amount of additional processing and computational resources. However, we have tried to justify the cost of using a sophisticated assimilation scheme by demonstrating strong regional and temporal dependencies of the covariance statistics, which include highly anisotropic and flow-dependent correlation functions. In particular, we observed a marked difference between error statistics in the equatorial region and at off-equatorial latitudes. We have also demonstrated how the assimilation of SLA and SST improves the model fields with respect to real observations. Independent in situ temperature profiles have been used to examine the impact of assimilating the remotely sensed observations. These intercomparisons have shown that the model temperature and salinity fields better resemble in situ observations in the assimilation experiment than in a model free-run case. On the other hand, it is also expected that assimilation of in situ profiles is needed to properly control the deep ocean circulation. Received: 8 January 2002 / Accepted: 8 April 2002     

A hybrid coordinate ocean model for shelf sea simulation

The general circulation in the North Sea and Skagerrak is simulated using the hybrid coordinate ocean model (HYCOM). Although HYCOM was originally developed for simulations of the open ocean, it has a design which should make it applicable also for coastal and shallow shelf seas. Thus, the objective of this study has been to examine the skills of the present version of HYCOM in a coastal shelf application, and to identify the areas where HYCOM needs to be further developed. To demonstrate the capability of the vertical coordinate in HYCOM, three experiments with different configurations of the vertical coordinate were carried out. In general, the results from these experiments compares quite well with in situ and satellite data, and the water masses and the general circulation in the North Sea and Skagerrak is reproduced in the simulations. Differences between the three experiments are small compared to other errors, which are related to a combined effect of model setup and properties of the vertical mixing scheme. Hence, it is difficult to quantify which vertical coordinate configuration works best for the coastal region. It is concluded that HYCOM can be used for simulations of coastal and shelf seas, and further suggestions for improving the model results are given. Since HYCOM also works well in open ocean and basin scale simulations, it may allow for a realistic modelling of the transition region between the open ocean and coastal shelf seas.