Fitting optimum order of Markov chain models for daily rainfall occurrences in Peninsular Malaysia

The analysis of the daily rainfall occurrence behavior is becoming more important, particularly in water-related sectors. Many studies have identified a more comprehensive pattern of the daily rainfall behavior based on the Markov chain models. One of the aims in fitting the Markov chain models of various orders to the daily rainfall occurrence is to determine the optimum order. In this study, the optimum order of the Markov chain models for a 5-day sequence will be examined in each of the 18 rainfall stations in Peninsular Malaysia, which have been selected based on the availability of the data, using the Akaike’s (AIC) and Bayesian information criteria (BIC). The identification of the most appropriate order in describing the distribution of the wet (dry) spells for each of the rainfall stations is obtained using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit test. It is found that the optimum order varies according to the levels of threshold used (e.g., either 0.1 or 10.0 mm), the locations of the region and the types of monsoon seasons. At most stations, the Markov chain models of a higher order are found to be optimum for rainfall occurrence during the northeast monsoon season for both levels of threshold. However, it is generally found that regardless of the monsoon seasons, the first-order model is optimum for the northwestern and eastern regions of the peninsula when the level of thresholds of 10.0 mm is considered. The analysis indicates that the first order of the Markov chain model is found to be most appropriate for describing the distribution of wet spells, whereas the higher-order models are found to be adequate for the dry spells in most of the rainfall stations for both threshold levels and monsoon seasons.     

The best fitting distribution of annual maximum rainfall in Peninsular Malaysia based on methods of L-moment and LQ-moment

This paper discusses patterns of annual and monthly precipitation variability at seven weather stations in east central Europe (1851–2007). Precipitation patterns were compared to three simple regional indices of atmospheric circulation, i.e., western circulation, southern circulation and the cyclonicity (C) index and a relationship between precipitation and the North Atlantic Oscillation index was identified. Correlations of the monthly records and multiple regression, using a principal components’ analysis, helped determine the statistical significance of the dependence of precipitation on the circulation indices. The Mann–Kendall test revealed no trend to change in any of the precipitation series, but a certain spatial regularity could be discerned in the phase of the annual periodic component. A common feature of the variability in central European annual precipitation is the dry period identified in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. In the northern part of the region, above-average precipitation was noted from the 1960s through to the mid-1970s as a result of the frequent prevalence of depressions. South of the divide, the wettest period was recorded at the turn of 1930s/1940s. After a number of very wet years in the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, precipitation began to fall at all of the region’s weather stations. The C index is the strongest circulation-linked factor influencing precipitation in central Europe and it accounts for more than 40% of the variance in spatially averaged wintertime precipitation.     

Volatility modeling of rainfall time series

Networks of rain gauges can provide a better insight into the spatial and temporal variability of rainfall, but they tend to be too widely spaced for accurate estimates. A way to estimate the spatial variability of rainfall between gauge points is to interpolate between them. This paper evaluates the spatial autocorrelation of rainfall data in some locations in Peninsular Malaysia using geostatistical technique. The results give an insight on the spatial variability of rainfall in the area, as such, two rain gauges were selected for an in-depth study of the temporal dependence of the rainfall data-generating process. It could be shown that rainfall data are affected by nonlinear characteristics of the variance often referred to as variance clustering or volatility, where large changes tend to follow large changes and small changes tend to follow small changes. The autocorrelation structure of the residuals and the squared residuals derived from autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were inspected, the residuals are uncorrelated but the squared residuals show autocorrelation, and the Ljung–Box test confirmed the results. A test based on the Lagrange multiplier principle was applied to the squared residuals from the ARIMA models. The results of this auxiliary test show a clear evidence to reject the null hypothesis of no autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) effect. Hence, it indicates that generalized ARCH (GARCH) modeling is necessary. An ARIMA error model is proposed to capture the mean behavior and a GARCH model for modeling heteroskedasticity (variance behavior) of the residuals from the ARIMA model. Therefore, the composite ARIMA–GARCH model captures the dynamics of daily rainfall in the study area. On the other hand, seasonal ARIMA model became a suitable model for the monthly average rainfall series of the same locations treated.     

A Simplified Semi-Automatic Technique for Highway Extraction from High-Resolution Airborne LiDAR Data and Orthophotos

Information on highways is an essential input for various geospatial applications, including car navigation, forensic analysis on highway geometries, and intelligent transportation systems. Semi-automatic and automatic extractions of highways are critical for the regular updating of municipal databases and for highway maintenance. This study presents a semi-automatic data processing approach for extracting highways from high-resolution airborne LiDAR height information and aerial orthophotos. The method was developed based on two data sets. Experimental results for the first testing site showed that the accuracy of the proposed method for highway extraction was 74.50 % for completeness and 73.13 % for correctness. Meanwhile, the completeness and correctness for the second testing site were 71.20 and 70.72 %, respectively. The proposed method was compared with an object-based approach on a different data set. The accuracy for highway extraction of the object-based approach was 64.29 % for completeness and 63.11 % for correctness, whereas that of the proposed method was 67.14 % for completeness and 65.08 % for correctness. This research aims to promote semi-automatic highway extraction from LiDAR data and orthophotos by proposing a new approach and a multistep post-processing technique. The proposed method provides an accurate final output that is valuable for a wide range of geospatial applications.     

Short note: A simple nomogram for interpretation due to magnetic horizontal cylinders

The magnetic anomaly ΔF due to a long horizontal cylinder yields three points related to its extrema. A nomogram is presented for the determination of some source parameters of the causative body.     

Separation of Vanillin from Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch Lignin

The separation of vanillin from the lignin of empty fruit bunch oil palm is presented in this study. The lignin was extracted from soda black liquor derived from oil palm empty fruit bunches (EFB) using 20% sulfuric acid. Nitrobenzene oxidation was carried out by adding 50 mg of dry EFB lignin into a mixture of 7 mL of 2 M NaOH and 4 mL of nitrobenzene in a 15 mL steel autoclave. The autoclave was sealed tightly with a screw cap fitted with a Teflon gasket and heated to 165°C for 3 h in a preheated thermostatic oil bath. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used to determine the concentration of each compound present in the lignin. There were eight compounds detected in the HPLC chromatogram. The crystallization process was then used as a method to separate vanillin from other compounds. Based on the solubility of vanillin in acetone, 15 mL of acetone was added to the residue of the oxidized products and heated to 60°C for 10 min. A yield of 1.6% vanillin was isolated from a 50 mg lignin sample. The isolated compound was analyzed with HPLC, Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometry (FT‐IR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (¹³C‐NMR) for structural verification. The results of the characterization studies proved that the isolated compound is vanillin.     

Inversion-based deblending using migration operators

In this paper, we compare the denoising- and inversion-based deblending methods using Stolt migration operators. We use Stolt operator as a kernel to efficiently compute apex-shifted hyperbolic Radon transform. Sparsity promoting transforms, such as Radon transform, can focus seismic data into a sparse model to separate signals, remove noise or interpolate missing traces. Therefore, Radon transforms are a suitable tool for either the denoising- or the inversion-based deblending methods. The denoising-based deblending treats blending interferences as random noise by sorting the data into new gathers, such as common receiver gather. In these gathers, blending interferences exhibit random structures due to the randomization of the source firing times. Alternatively, the inversion-based deblending treats blending interferences as a signal, and the transform models this signal by incorporating the blending operator to formulate an inversion problem. We compare both methods using a robust inversion algorithm with sparse regularization. Results of synthetic and field data examples show that the inversion-based deblending can produce more accurate signal separation for highly blended data.     

Variability of water exchanges through the Strait of Hormuz

Ocean Dynamics - The variability of the water mass exchange between the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean is investigated using a high-resolution (1/36°) ocean model. We focus on the period...