Sensitivity of hydrological variables to climate change in the Haihe River basin,China

Using the defined sensitivity index, the sensitivity of streamflow, evapotranspiration and soil moisture to climate change was investigated in four catchments in the Haihe River basin. Climate change contained three parts: annual precipitation and temperature change and the change of the percentage of precipitation in the flood season (P_f). With satisfying monthly streamflow simulation using the variable infiltration capacity model, the sensitivity was estimated by the change of simulated hydrological variables with hypothetical climatic scenarios and observed climatic data. The results indicated that (i) the sensitivity of streamflow would increase as precipitation or P_f increased but would decrease as temperature increased; (ii) the sensitivity of evapotranspiration and soil moisture would decrease as precipitation or temperature increased, but it to P_f varied in different catchments; and (iii) hydrological variables were more sensitive to precipitation, followed by P_f, and then temperature. The nonlinear response of streamflow, evapotranspiration and soil moisture to climate change could provide a reference for water resources planning and management under future climate change scenarios in the Haihe River basin. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Passive microwave remote sensing of the historic February 2010 snowstorms in the Middle Atlantic region of the USA

The snowfall in the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area during the winter of 2009/2010 was unprecedented and caused serious snow‐related disruptions. In February 2010, snowfall totals approached 2 m, and because maximum temperatures were consistently below normal, snow remained on the ground the entire month. One of the biggest contributing factors to the unusually severe winter weather in 2009/2010, throughout much of the middle latitudes, was the Arctic Oscillation. Unusually high pressure at high latitudes and low pressure at middle latitudes forced a persistent exchange of mass from north to south. In this investigation, a concerted effort was made to link remotely sensed falling snow observations to remotely sensed snow cover and snowpack observations in the Baltimore/Washington area. Specifically, the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer onboard the Aqua satellite was used to assess snow water equivalent, and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit‐B and Microwave Humidity Sounder were employed to detect falling snow. Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer passive microwave signatures in this study are related to both snow on the ground and surface ice layers. In regard to falling snow, signatures indicative of snowfall can be observed in high frequency brightness temperatures of Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit‐B and Microwave Humidity Sounder. Indeed, retrievals show an increase in snow water equivalent after the detection of falling snow. Yet, this work also shows that falling snow intensity and/or the presence of liquid water clouds impacts the ability to reliably detect snow water equivalent. Moreover, changes in the condition of the snowpack, especially in the surface features, negatively affect retrieval performance. Copyright © 2011. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.     

High‐accuracy practical spline‐based 3D and 2D integral transformations in potential‐field geophysics

Potential, potential field and potential‐field gradient data are supplemental to each other for resolving sources of interest in both exploration and solid Earth studies. We propose flexible high‐accuracy practical techniques to perform 3D and 2D integral transformations from potential field components to potential and from potential‐field gradient components to potential field components in the space domain using cubic B‐splines. The spline techniques are applicable to either uniform or non‐uniform rectangular grids for the 3D case, and applicable to either regular or irregular grids for the 2D case. The spline‐based indefinite integrations can be computed at any point in the computational domain. In our synthetic 3D gravity and magnetic transformation examples, we show that the spline techniques are substantially more accurate than the Fourier transform techniques, and demonstrate that harmonicity is confirmed substantially better for the spline method than the Fourier transform method and that spline‐based integration and differentiation are invertible. The cost of the increase in accuracy is an increase in computing time. Our real data examples of 3D transformations show that the spline‐based results agree substantially better or better with the observed data than do the Fourier‐based results. The spline techniques would therefore be very useful for data quality control through comparisons of the computed and observed components. If certain desired components of the potential field or gradient data are not measured, they can be obtained using the spline‐based transformations as alternatives to the Fourier transform techniques.     

Present-Day Crustal Vertical Motion Around the Ordos Block Constrained by Precise Leveling and GPS Data

Precise leveling data observed in the period of 1970–2014 around the Ordos block were collected and processed to estimate present-day crustal vertical movement. Vertical rates of 6 GPS sites were employed as a priori constraints to define the reference frame. The velocity field shows that the interior of the Ordos block moves upward at a rate of 3 mm/a as a stable block. With respect to the central Ordos, the grabens and rifts around the Ordos block are undergoing subsidence, while the northeastern and southwestern Ordos uplift at the average rates of 2 and 1 mm/a, respectively. To the southeastern margin of the Ordos block, the Weihe and southern Shanxi grabens are subsiding at the rates of 4–6 mm/a. The subsidence of the Shanxi graben indicates that the graben is experiencing extensional movement on a long timescale. To the northwestern margin of the Ordos block, the Hetao and Yinchuan rifts are subsiding at the rates of 2–3 mm/a. A 2-D buried faulting model is used to infer the normal or reverse dip-slip rates. Our solution shows that most of the normal slip rates along the faults in the grabens and rifts are ~2 mm/a.     

The effect of volatile components in oil on evolutionary characteristics of diamondoids during oil thermal pyrolysis

On the basis of the results of simulation experiments, now we better understand the contribution of high carbon number hydrocarbons to diamondoid generation during thermal pyrolysis of crude oil and its sub-fractions(saturated, aromatic, resin, and asphalene fractions). However, little is known about the effect of volatile components in oil on diamondoid generation and diamondoid indices due to the lack of attention to these components in experiments. In this study, the effect of volatile components in oil on diamondoid generation and maturity indices was investigated by the pyrolysis simulation experiments on a normal crude oil from the HD23 well of the Tarim Basin and its residual oil after artificial volatilization, combined with quantitative analysis of diamondoids. The results indicate that the volatile components(≤n C12) in oil have an obvious contribution to the generation of adamantanes, which occurs mainly in the early stage of oil cracking(Easy Ro1.0%), and influences the variations in maturity indices of adamantanes; but they have no obvious effect on the generation and maturity indices of diamantanes. Therefore, some secondary alterations e.g., migration, gas washing, and biodegradation, which may result in the loss of light hydrocarbons in oil under actual geological conditions, could affect the identification of adamantanes generated during the late-stage cracking of crude oil, and further influence the practical application of adamantane indices.     

The absolute paleoposition of the North China Block during the Middle Ordovician

Present-day hot spots and Phanerozoic large igneous provinces(LIPs) and kimberlites mainly occur at the edges of the projections of Large Low Shear Wave Velocity Provinces(LLSVPs) on the earth's surface. If a plate contains accurately dated LIPs or kimberlites, it is possible to obtain the absolute paleoposition of the plate from the LIP/kimberlite and paleomagnetic data. The presence of Middle Ordovician kimberlites in the North China Block provides an opportunity to determine the absolute paleoposition of the block during the Middle Ordovician. In addition to paleobiogeographical information and the results of previous work on global plate reconstruction for the Ordovician Period, we selected published paleomagnetic data for the North China Block during the Middle Ordovician and determined the most reasonable absolute paleoposition of the North China Block during the Middle Ordovician: paleolatitude of approximately 16.6°S to 19.1°S and paleolongitude of approximately 10°W. The block was located between the Siberian Plate and Gondwana, close to the Siberian Plate. During the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, the North China Block may have moved toward the Siberian Plate and away from the Australian Plate.     

Seismites in the Dasheng Group: New evidence of strong tectonic and earthquake activities of the Tanlu Fault Zone

More than 80 layers of seismites were recognized from the Early Cretaceous Dasheng Group in the Mazhan and Tancheng graben basins in the Tanlu Fault Zone, eastern China. The responsible seismic events took place about 110–100 Ma in the Early Cretaceous. The fault zone was affected at the time by strong tectonics, due to tension-related stretching and scattered squeezing by strike-slip faults. These tectonic activities induced a series of strong earthquakes with Richter magnitudes(M) of 5–8.5. The earthquakes affected saturated or semi-consolidated flood and lake sediments, and produced intra-layer deformations by several processes, including liquefaction, thixotropy, drop, faulting, cracking, filling and folding, which resulted in the formation of various soft-sediment deformation structures, such as dikes and veins of liquefied sand, liquefied breccias, liquefied homogeneous layers, load structures, flame structures, ball-and-pillow structures, boudinage, diapirs, fissure infillings, a giant conglomerate wedge, and syn-sedimentary faults. The seismites are new evidence of tectonic and seismic activities in the Tanlu Fault Zone during the Early Cretaceous; the series of strong seismic events that can be deduced from them must be considered as a response to the destruction of the North China Craton.     

Reducing the biases in shortwave cloud radiative forcing in tropical and subtropical regions from the perspective of boundary layer processes

Biases in shortwave cloud radiative forcing (SWCF), which cause overestimates in tropical regions and underestimates in subtropical marine stratocumulus regions, are common in many climate models. Here, two boundary layer processes are investigated in the atmospheric model GAMIL2, entrainment at the top of the boundary layer and longwave radiative cooling at the top of stratocumulus clouds, in order to reduce biases and reveal the mechanisms underlying these processes. Our results show that including the entrainment process in the model can reduce negative SWCF biases in most tropical regions but increases positive SWCF biases in subtropical marine stratocumulus regions. This occurs because entrainment reduces the low-level cloud fraction and its cloud liquid water content by suppressing the vertical turbulent diffusion in the boundary layer and decreasing the relative humidity when warm and dry free atmosphere is entrained in the boundary layer. Longwave radiative cooling at the top of stratocumulus clouds can enhance turbulent diffusion within the stratocumulus-topped boundary layer. When combined with the entrainment process, longwave radiative cooling reduces the positive SWCF biases in subtropical marine stratocumulus regions that are observed using the entrainment process alone. The incorporation of these two boundary layer processes improves the simulated SWCF in tropical and subtropical regions in GAMIL2.     

Water quality assessment of the Huaihe River segment of Bengbu (China) using multivariate statistical techniques

In the study, multivariate statistical methods including principal component analysis (PCA)/factor analysis (FA) and cluster analysis (CA) were applied to analyze surface water quality data sets obtained from the Huaihe River segment of Bengbu (HRSB) and generated during 2 years (2011–2012) monitoring of 19 parameters at 7 sampling sites. The results of PCA for 7 sampling sites revealed that the first four components of PCA showed 94.89% of the total variance in the data sets of HRSB. The Principal components (Factors) obtained from FA indicated that the parameters for water quality variations were mainly related to heavy metals (Pb, Mn, Zn and Fe) and organic related parameters (COD, PI and DO). The results revealed that the major causes of water quality deterioration were related to inflow of industrial, domestic and agricultural effluents into the Huaihe River. Three significant sampling locations—(sites 2, 3 and 4), (sites 1 and 5) and (sites 6 and 7)—were detected on the basis of similarity of their water quality. Thus, these methods were believed to be valuable to help water resources managers understand complex nature of water quality issues and determine the priorities to improve water quality.     

Multi-resolution graph-based clustering analysis for lithofacies identification from well log data: Case study of intraplatform bank gas fields,Amu Darya Basin

In this study, we used the multi-resolution graph-based clustering (MRGC) method for determining the electrofacies (EF) and lithofacies (LF) from well log data obtained from the intraplatform bank gas fields located in the Amu Darya Basin. The MRGC could automatically determine the optimal number of clusters without prior knowledge about the structure or cluster numbers of the analyzed data set and allowed the users to control the level of detail actually needed to define the EF. Based on the LF identification and successful EF calibration using core data, an MRGC EF partition model including five clusters and a quantitative LF interpretation chart were constructed. The EF clusters 1 to 5 were interpreted as lagoon, anhydrite flat, interbank, low-energy bank, and high-energy bank, and the coincidence rate in the cored interval could reach 85%. We concluded that the MRGC could be accurately applied to predict the LF in non-cored but logged wells. Therefore, continuous EF clusters were partitioned and corresponding LF were interpreted, and the distribution and petrophysical characteristics of different LF were analyzed in the framework of sequence stratigraphy.