Sedimentation on the Ionian active margin (Hellenic arc) — Provenance of sediments and mechanisms of deposition

Lithological, sedimentological, mineralogical and faunal analyses of twenty cores from the western Peloponnesus margin and adjacent Matapan Trench permit the origin of the sediments and the processes of sedimentation to be defined in some detail.Except for the ash layers derived from the Ischian Province, the major part of the sediment is local in origin (Peloponnesus). Analyses of heavy, light and clay minerals enable three main provinces to be distinguished. Each of these provinces includes one or more slope basins and a portion of trench, without lateral connection between them and mixing of inputs.The diversity and complexity of sedimentary structures, the granulometric characters, the mixed fauna (molluscs and ostracods) and the variability of rates of sedimentation all testify to the prevalence of reworking phenomena and gravitative processes.These data confirm and elaborate on the model of sedimentation deduced from seismic studies in which sediments are successively trapped, released by the slope basins and transferred via channels and canyons towards the underlying trench basins. This “cascade feeding” appears characteristics of this subductive sedimentary environment.     

Low-low satellite-to-satellite tracking: a comparison between analytical linear orbit perturbation theory and numerical integration

Low-low satellite-to-satellite tracking (ll-SST) range-rate observations have been predicted by two methods: one based on a linear perturbation theory in combination with the Hill equations, and one based on solving the equations of motion of two low-flying satellites by numerical integration. The two methods produce almost equivalent Fourier spectra of the range-rate observations after properly taking into account a few resonant terms. For a typical GRACE-type configuration, where the two satellites trail each other at a distance of 300 km at an altitude of 460 km, and in the presence of the EGM96 gravity field model, complete to spherical harmonic degree and order 70, the agreement between the Fourier spectra is about 1 mm/s compared to a root-mean-square (RMS) value of more than 220 mm/s for the range-rate signal. The discrepancy of 1 mm/s can be reduced significantly when not taking into account perturbations caused by the J₂ term. Excluding the J₂ term, the agreement between the two methods improves to 0.4 mm/s compared to a RMS value of 6 mm/s for the range-rate signal. These values are 0.01 and 2.3 mm/s when ignoring the spectrum for frequencies below two cycles per orbital revolution, reducing the discrepancy even further to about 0.5% of the signal. The selected linear perturbation theory is thus capable of modeling gravity field induced range-rate observations with very high precision for a large part of the spectrum.     

Temporal change detection in river courses and flood plains in an arid environment through satellite remote sensing

Temporal changes in ephemeral river courses and associated flood plains, which could not be detected by Landsat MSS due to its poor spatial resolution of 80m, have been identified and mapped within 10% accuracy by Landsat TM False colour composite because of its higher spectral and spatial resolution of 30 m. Over a period of 28 years (1958–86) the river courses widened upto 1.8 times through bank erosion due to the recurring flash floods. The flash floods have also caused morphological, soil fertility and landuse changes in the associated flood plains, which could also be monitored by the Landsat TM.     

An automated seamless mosaicing system of multi-charge coupled devices of panchromatic data

Panchromatic data of pixel resolution 5.8 m obtained from IRS-1C and IRS-1D satellites proved to be very useful for mapping purposes. One of the popular data product is the 70 km swath mosaic which is covered by a combination of 3 CCD line sensors, each with 4096 pixels. Each CCD-line sensor with different imaging times causes geometric problems of mosaicing three strips data together. In this paper, we propose the details of the design elements of system that caters to the need for accurate and automatic multi strip image registration without any second resampling of the data. The systematic geometric correction grid mapping is improved to facilitate accurate mosaicing by automatic image registration task that makes use of the overlap data within image strips and image registration is achieved up to sub-pixel level.     

Internet teaching foundation for the Remote Sensing Core Curriculum program

The Remote Sensing Core Curriculum (RSCC) was initiated in 1993 to meet the demands for a college-level set of resources to enhance the quality of education across national and international campuses. The American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing adopted the RSCC in 1996 to sustain support of this educational initiative for its membership and collegiate community. A series of volumes, containing lectures, exercises, and data, is being created by expert contributors to address the different technical fields of remote sensing. The RSCC program is designed to operate on the Internet taking full advantage of the World Wide Web (WWW) technology for distance learning. The issues of curriculum development related to the educational setting, with demands on faculty, students, and facilities, is considered to understand the new paradigms for WW-influenced computer-aided learning. The WWW is shown to be especially appropriate for facilitating remote sensing education with requirements for addressing image data sets and multimedia learning tools. The RSCC is located at http://www.umbc.edu/rscc     

Electricity consumption patterns within cities: application of a data-driven settlement characterization method

ABSTRACT

Urban areas presently consume around 75% of global primary energy supply, which is expected to significantly increase in the future due to urban growth. Having sustainable, universal energy access is a pressing challenge for most parts of the globe. Understanding urban energy consumption patterns may help to address the challenges to urban sustainability and energy security. However, urban energy analyses are severely limited by the lack of urban energy data. Such datasets are virtually non-existent for the developing countries. As per current projections, most of the new urban growth is bound to occur in these data-starved regions. Hence, there is an urgent need of research methods for monitoring and quantifying urban energy utilization patterns. Here, we apply a data-driven approach to characterize urban settlements based on their formality, which is then used to assess intra-urban urban energy consumption in Johannesburg, South Africa; Sana’a, Yemen; and Ndola, Zambia. Electricity is the fastest growing energy fuel. By analyzing the relationship between the settlement types and the corresponding nighttime light emission, a proxy of electricity consumption, we assess the differential electricity consumption patterns. Our study presents a simple and scalable solution to fill the present data void to understand intra-city electricity consumption patterns.     

New analytical and numerical approaches for geopotential modeling

 The standard analytical approach which is applied for constructing geopotential models OSU86 and earlier ones, is based on reducing the boundary value equation to a sphere enveloping the Earth and then solving it directly with respect to the potential coefficients _n,m . In an alternative procedure, developed by Jekeli and used for constructing the models OSU91 and EGM96, at first an ellipsoidal harmonic series is developed for the geopotential and then its coefficients _n,m ^e are transformed to the unknown _n,m . The second solution is more exact, but much more complicated. The standard procedure is modified and a new simple integral formula is derived for evaluating the potential coefficients. The efficiency of the standard and new procedures is studied numerically. In these solutions the same input data are used as for constructing high-degree parts of the EGM96 models. From two sets of _n,m (n≤360,|m|≤n), derived by the standard and new approaches, different spectral characteristics of the gravity anomaly and the geoid undulation are estimated and then compared with similar characteristics evaluated by Jekeli's approach (`etalon' solution). The new solution appears to be very close to Jekeli's, as opposed to the standard solution. The discrepancies between all the characteristics of the new and `etalon' solutions are smaller than the corresponding discrepancies between two versions of the final geopotential model EGM96, one of them (HDM190) constructed by the block-diagonal least squares (LS) adjustment and the other one (V068) by using Jekeli's approach. On the basis of the derived analytical solution a new simple mathematical model is developed to apply the LS technique for evaluating geopotential coefficients. Received: 12 December 2000 / Accepted: 21 June 2001     

On the Distance Function Between Two Keplerian Elliptic Orbits

The problem of finding critical points of the distance function between two Keplerian elliptic orbits is reduced to the determination of all real roots of a trigonometric polynomial of degree 8. The coefficients of the polynomial are rational functions of orbital parameters. Using computer algebra methods we show that a polynomial of a smaller degree with such properties does not exist. This fact shows that our result cannot be improved and it allows us to construct an optimal algorithm to find the minimal distance between two Keplerian orbits. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Evaluation of significant sources influencing the variation of physico-chemical parameters in Port Blair Bay,South Andaman,India by using multivariate statistics

Port Blair is the capital city of Andaman & Nicobar Islands, the union territory of India. More than 50% of the population of these islands lives around Port Blair Bay. Therefore the anthropogenic effects in the bay water were studied for monitoring purpose from seven stations. Physico-chemical parameters of seawater were analyzed in samples collected once in every 3 months for 2 years from seven sampling stations located in Port Blair Bay, South Andaman Island to evaluate the spatial and tidal variation. Cluster analysis and factor analysis were applied to the experimental data in an attempt to understand the sources of variation of physico-chemical parameters. In cluster analysis, the stations Junglighat Bay and Phoenix Bay having high anthropogenic influence formed a separate group. The factors obtained from factor analysis indicated that the parameters responsible for physico-chemical variations are mainly related to land run-off, sewage outfall and tidal flow.