An estimate of the glacier ice volume in the Swiss Alps

Changes in glacier volume are important for questions linked to sea-level rise, water resource management, and tourism industry. With the ongoing climate warming, the retreat of mountain glaciers is a major concern. Predictions of glacier changes, necessarily need the present ice volume as initial condition, and for transient modelling, the ice thickness distribution has to be known. In this paper, a method based on mass conservation and principles of ice flow dynamics is applied to 62 glaciers located in the Swiss Alps for estimating their ice thickness distribution. All available direct ice thickness measurements are integrated. The ice volumes are referenced to the year 1999 by means of a mass balance time series. The results are used to calibrate a volume–area scaling relation, and the coefficients obtained show good agreement with values reported in the literature. We estimate the total ice volume present in the Swiss Alps in the year 1999 to be 74 ± 9 km³. About 12% of this volume was lost between 1999 and 2008, whereas the extraordinarily warm summer 2003 caused a volume loss of about 3.5%.     

Multi-spacecraft Observations of CIR-Associated Ion Increases During the Ulysses 2007 Ecliptic Crossing

The period between 21 June and 8 October, 2007 (Carrington rotations 2058 to 2061), comprising the Ulysses ecliptic plane crossing, was characterized by low solar activity. Excluding the small solar energetic particle events observed during July, the ion increases observed in the inner heliosphere between 100?keV/n and 10?MeV/n were associated with Corotating Interaction Regions (CIRs). In this work, we investigate CIR-related ion increases using multipoint observations from Ulysses, ACE, and the twin STEREO spacecraft. The ballistic backmapping technique has been used to correlate in situ observations of these spacecraft and remote-sensing observations of coronal holes. Although the radial, longitudinal and latitudinal separation of the spacecraft (except Ulysses) are relatively small, we find discrepancies when a detailed comparison of narrow structures like stream interfaces and CIR-associated shocks is performed. Therefore we concentrate on the two CIR events from day 5 to day 10 of August 2007 and from day 25 to day 31 of August 2007, which lend themselves to a more undisturbed comparison. Using the multi-spacecraft measurements we could determine a radial gradient of 230±30% AU^?1, which is consistent with previous results by van Hollebeke et al. (J. Geophys. Res. 83, 4723, 1978) of ～?350% AU^?1 using Helios and Pioneer data.

     

Relative sea level changes during the Holocene in the Sisimiut area,south‐western Greenland

Holocene relative sea level (RSL) changes have been investigated by analysing and dating isolation sequences from five lakes near Sisimiut in south‐western Greenland. The transitions between marine and lacustrine sediments were determined from elemental analyses and analyses of macroscopic plant and animal remains. Radiocarbon dating was used to provide minimum ages for the transitions and to construct a RSL curve. Dating of a shell of the marine bivalve Macoma balthica indicates that deglaciation of the lowlands occurred in the early Holocene, at around 10 900 cal a BP. The RSL curve shows initial rapid regression from the marine limit at around 140 m, implying strong glacio‐isostatic rebound. We suggest that the margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet was located at the shelf break during the Last Glacial Maximum. Frequent remains of the ostracode Sarcypridopsis aculeata, which is a thermophilous brackish water species that is unknown from the extant fauna of Greenland, in one of the basins around 8500 cal a BP may mark the beginning of the Holocene thermal maximum in the region. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

STABILITY OF GRAVEL BED RIVERS BASED ON SIEVE ANALYSIS DATA

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On wavelet analysis of nonstationary turbulence

Wavelets are new tools for turbulence analysis that are yielding important insights into boundary-layer processes. Wavelet analysis, however, has some as yet undiscussed limitations: failure to recognize these can lead to misinterpretation of wavelet analysis results. Here we discuss some limitations of wavelet analysis when applied to nonstationary turbulence. Our main point is that the analysis wavelet must be carefully matched to the phenomenon of interest, because wavelet coefficients obscure significant information in the signal being analyzed. For example, a wavelet that is a second-difference operator can provide no information on the linear trend in a turbulence signal. Wavelet analysis also yields no meaningful information about nonlinear behavior in a signal — contrary to claims in the literature — because, at any instant, a wavelet is a single-scale operator, while nonlinearity involves instantaneous interactions among many scales.     

Hydrometric and hydrochemicai evidence for fast flowpaths at La Cuenca, Western Amazonia

A hydrological reconnaissance study in a first-order tropical rainforest catchment in western Amazonia implicated overland flow as an important hydrological pathway. A complementary hydrometric and hydrochemical approach that involved the recording of overland flow hydrographs and the determination of streamflow, overland flow, groundwater, soil water, and throughfall chemical signatures, was essential to establish unambiguously the importance of this pathway. Largely uncontrolled by topography, overland flow does occur in any season, regardless of antecedent moisture conditions, which only influence the volumes generated. The latter effect is also reflected in a close approximation of stormflow and overland flow chemical signatures, as expressed in the K/SiO ratio. We conclude that, despite its greater logistical demands, a complementary hydrometric/hydrochemical approach is essential to understand a catchment's hydrological behaviour, especially where fast pathways are at work; such pathways are apparently common in more forest ecosystems than has been previously assumed.     

A simple boom assembly for the shipboard deployment of air-sea interaction instruments

We have developed a simple boom for use in measuring meteorological variables from a ship. The main structural member of the boom, a triangular communications tower with rollers attached along its bottom side, is deployed horizontally from a long, flat deck, such as a helicopter deck, and will support a 100-kg payload at its outboard end. The boom is easy to deploy, requires minimal ship modifications, and provides ready access to the instruments mounted on it. And because it is designed for use with the ship crosswind, oceanographic work can go on at the same time as the air-sea interaction measurements.We describe our use of the boom on the Mikhail Somov during a cruise into the Antarctic sea ice and present some representative measurements made with instruments mounted on it. Theory, experiment, and our data all imply that instruments deployed windward from a rear helicopter deck can reach air undisturbed by the ship. Such an instrument site has clear advantages over the more customary mast, bow, or buoy locations.     

Predicting significant wave height off the northeast coast of the United States

To develop a simple method to predict the significant wave height, we analyze 18 years of hourly observations from 12 different buoys that are off the northeast coast of the United States. Water depths ranged from 19 to 4427 m for these moored buoys. We find that, on average, all of these buoys exhibit a region of constant wave height for 10-m wind speeds between 0 and 4 m s⁻¹. That wave height does, however, depend on water depth. For wind speeds above 4 m s^–1, the wave height increases as the square of the wind speed; but the multiplicative factor is again a function of water depth. We synthesize these results in a prediction scheme that yields the significant wave height from simple functions of water depth and 10-m wind speed for wind speeds up to 25 m s^–1.     

Characterization of and correction for cultural noise

Surveys of time varying electromagnetic fields result in time series consisting of signals and noise, the latter defined as that part of the data which cannot be explained by a theory. Man-made contributions to noise can be subdivided into active and passive sources and are complex in character. As Szarka has treated this topic extensively in a recent review paper (Szarka, 1988), only a few further examples are presented here. Following discussion of noise correction in transient electromagnetic investigations which consists mainly of sophisticated stacking and filter procedures, several aspects of its correction in magnetotelluric and geomagnetic depth sounding data are considered. These include:

1. The methods of treatment of single time series in the presence of visible noise—its detection, removal and sometimes replacement by data predicted from undisturbed intervals.
2. The investigation of time series interrelations. This is mainly coherence based and—if possible—takes advantage of remote reference techniques.
3. The examination of the statistical properties of the time series by regression analysis. This leads to the weighting of time segments of data in order to achieve unbiased and minimum variance estimates based on identically and independently Gaussian distributed residuals.
4. The application of constraints. These can further improve the estimates' quality.
5. The use of simultaneously recorded multistation data. This can contribute remarkably to noise suppression as well as to the treatment of non-uniform source fields.
6. Leveraging and confidence limits. Problems relating to the former have not yet been solved satisfactorily while the Jacknife method seems to be an easy way of determining the latter.

Thanks to the modern processing techniques reviewed in this paper it should be possible to obtain a rather dense net of high quality data in spite of the world-wide increasing noise level. As most processing codes are widely accessible current problems are more related to availability of instruments, carrying out the measurements and reserving enough time for thorough data processing.