Probabilistic assessment of the water quality of bathing beaches on the Taiwanese coast using indicator-based geostatistics with one-dimensional cyclic coordinates

Because Taiwan is a subtropical island, many pleasure beaches are situated on its coast. However, according to long-term monitoring data, fecal contamination at Taiwanese coastal beaches frequently exceeds the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines. To avoid public health hazards, mapping the spatial extent of this contamination is crucial. This study applied indicator kriging (IK) to probabilistically assess the water quality of bathing beaches on the Taiwanese coast. Moreover, because the discontinuity of the traditional Cartesian coordinate established on an island coastline is difficult for geostatistical estimates, this study proposed a novel kriging estimation approach to deal with this problem. First, a one-dimensional (1-D) cyclic coordinate system of the Taiwanese coast was established using primary and secondary coordinates at each beach site. Escherichia coli (E. coli) and enterococci concentrations at coastal beaches were converted into indicator variables according to the U.S. EPA guidelines. IK was then used to spatially model the occurrence probabilities that exceeded the U.S. EPA guidelines for E. coli and enterococci. Finally, the water quality of bathing beaches on the Taiwanese coast was classified on the basis of the estimated probabilities. The study results indicated that bathing on the central western, northeastern, and southeastern Taiwanese coasts poses a potential threat to human health caused by high levels of fecal contamination. Moreover, primary and secondary coordinates established at beach sites were capable of analyzing the spatial variability and kriging estimates of the 1-D cyclic coordinates along the coastline.     

Changes in Fish Assemblages after Dike Construction in the Saemangeum Area

In the Saemangeum area, construction of a dike began in 1991 and was completed in 2006; desalination is currently being conducted. In order to investigate     

Long-term Changes of Disinfection Byproducts in Treatment of Simulated Ballast Water

This study investigated the changes in concentrations of haloacetic acids (HAAs) and haloacetonitriles (HANs) as disinfection byproducts (DBPs) for differe     

Distribution and Sources of Dissolved and Particulate Heavy Metals (Mn,Co, Ni,Cu, Zn,Cd, Pb) in Masan Bay,Korea

Ocean Science Journal - In this study, we investigated the spatial and temporal distribution and sources of dissolved and particulate heavy metals in Masan Bay, an area that for a long time has...     

A Review on Marine N2 Fixation: Mechanism,Evolution of Methodologies,Rates, and Future Concerns

Ocean Science Journal - Investigations on marine N2 fixation have gained momentum since 1960s with eventual establishments of relevant methodologies to identify species involved and quantify the...     

Effects of Geometries and Substructures of ICMEs on Geomagnetic Storms

To better understand geomagnetic storm generations by ICMEs, we consider the effect of substructures (magnetic cloud, MC, and sheath) and geometries (impact location of flux-rope at the Earth) of the ICMEs. We apply the toroidal magnetic flux-rope model to 59 CDAW CME–ICME pairs to identify their substructures and geometries, and select 20 MC-associated and five sheath-associated storm events. We investigate the relationship between the storm strength indicated by minimum Dst index \((\mathrm{Dst}_{\mathrm{min}})\) and solar wind conditions related to a southward magnetic field. We find that all slopes of linear regression lines for sheath-storm events are steeper (\({\geq}\,1.4\)) than those of the MC-storm events in the relationship between \(\mathrm{Dst}_{\mathrm{min}}\) and solar wind conditions, implying that the efficiency of sheath for the process of geomagnetic storm generations is higher than that of MC. These results suggest that different general solar wind conditions (sheaths have a higher density, dynamic and thermal pressures with a higher fluctuation of the parameters and higher magnetic fields than MCs) have different impact on storm generation. Regarding the geometric encounter of ICMEs, 100% (2/2) of major storms (\(\mathrm{Dst}_{\mathrm{min}} \leq -100~\mbox{nT}\)) occur in the regions at negative \(P_{Y}\) (relative position of the Earth trajectory from the ICME axis in the \(Y\) component of the GSE coordinate) when the eastern flanks of ICMEs encounter the Earth. We find similar statistical trends in solar wind conditions, suggesting that the dependence of geomagnetic storms on 3D ICME–Earth impact geometries is caused by asymmetric distributions of the geoeffective solar wind conditions. For western flank events, 80% (4/5) of the major storms occur in positive \(P_{Y}\) regions, while intense geoeffective solar wind conditions are not located in the positive \(P_{Y}\). These results suggest that the strength of geomagnetic storms depends on ICME–Earth impact geometries as they determine the solar wind conditions at Earth.     

Relation of CME Speed and Magnetic Helicity in CME Source Regions on the Sun during the Early Phase of Solar Cycles 23 and 24

To investigate the relations between coronal mass ejection (CME) speed and magnetic field properties measured in the photospheric surface of CME source regions, we selected 22 disk CMEs in the rising and early maximum phases of the current Solar Cycle 24. For the CME speed, we used two-dimensional (2D) projected speed observed by the Large Angle and Spectroscopic Coronagraph onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO/LASCO), as well as a 3D speed calculated from the triangulation method using multi-point observations. Two magnetic parameters of CME source regions were considered: the average of magnetic helicity injection rate and the total unsigned magnetic flux. We then classified the selected CMEs into two groups, showing: i) a monotonically increasing pattern with one sign of helicity (group A: 16 CMEs) and ii) a pattern of significant helicity injection followed by its sign reversal (group B: 6 CMEs). We found that: 1) 3D speed generally shows better correlations with the magnetic parameters than the 2D speed for 22 CME events in Solar Cycle 24; 2) 2D speed and the magnetic parameters of 22 CME events in this solar cycle have lower values than those of 47 CME events in Solar Cycle 23; 3) all events of group B in Solar Cycle 24 occur only after the beginning of the maximum phase, a trend well consistent with that shown in Solar Cycle 23; 4) the 2D speed and the helicity parameter of group B events continue to increase in the declining phase of Solar Cycle 23, while those of group A events abruptly decrease in the same period. Our results indicate that the two CME groups have a different tendency in the solar cycle variations of CME speed and the helicity parameters. Active regions that show a complex helicity evolution pattern tend to appear in the maximum and declining phases, while active regions with a relatively simple helicity evolution pattern appear throughout the whole solar cycle.     

Field survey of the East Java earthquake and tsunami of June 3, 1994

A field survey of the June 3, 1994 East Java earthquake tsunami was conducted within three weeks, and the distributions of the seismic intensities, tsunami heights, and human and house damages were surveyed. The seismic intensities on the south coasts of Java and Bali Islands were small for an earthquake with magnitudeM 7.6. The earthquake caused no land damage. About 40 minutes after the main shock, a huge tsunami attacked the coasts, several villages in East Java Province were damaged severely, and 223 persons perished. At Pancer Village about 70 percent of the houses were swept away and 121 persons were killed by the tsunami. The relationship between tsunami heights and distances from the source shows that the Hatori's tsunami magnitude wasm=3, which seems to be larger for the earthquake magnitude. But we should not consider this an extraordinary event because it was pointed out byHatori (1994) that the magnitudes of tsunamis in the Indonesia-Philippine region generally exceed 1–2 grade larger than those of other regions.     

Improved amplitude preservation for prestack depth migration by inverse scattering theory

A prestack reverse time-migration image is not properly scaled with increasing depth. The main reason for the image being unscaled is the geometric spreading of the wavefield arising during the back-propagation of the measured data and the generation of the forward-modelled wavefields. This unscaled image can be enhanced by multiplying the inverse of the approximate Hessian appearing in the Gauss–Newton optimization technique. However, since the approximate Hessian is usually too expensive to compute for the general geological model, it can be used only for the simple background velocity model.We show that the pseudo-Hessian matrix can be used as a substitute for the approximate Hessian to enhance the faint images appearing at a later time in the 2D prestack reverse time-migration sections. We can construct the pseudo-Hessian matrix using the forward-modelled wavefields (which are used as virtual sources in the reverse time migration), by exploiting the uncorrelated structure of the forward-modelled wavefields and the impulse response function for the estimated diagonal of the approximate Hessian. Although it is also impossible to calculate directly the inverse of the pseudo-Hessian, when using the reciprocal of the pseudo-Hessian we can easily obtain the inverse of the pseudo-Hessian. As examples supporting our assertion, we present the results obtained by applying our method to 2D synthetic and real data collected on the Korean continental shelf.