Aftershocks series monitoring of the September 18, 2004 M = 4.6 earthquake at the western Pyrenees: A case of reservoir-triggered seismicity?

On September 18, 2004, a 4.6 mbLg earthquake was widely felt in the region around Pamplona, at the western Pyrenees. Preliminary locations reported an epicenter less than 20 km ESE of Pamplona and close to the Itoiz reservoir, which started impounding in January 2004. The area apparently lacks of significant seismic activity in recent times. After the main shock, which was preceded by series of foreshocks reaching magnitudes of 3.3 mbLg, a dense temporal network of 13 seismic stations was deployed there to monitor the aftershocks series and to constrain the hypocentral pattern. Aftershock determinations obtained with a double-difference algorithm define a narrow epicentral zone of less than 10 km², ESE–WNW oriented. The events are mainly concentrated between 3 and 9 km depth. Focal solutions were computed for the main event and 12 aftershocks including the highest secondary one of 3.8 mbLg. They show mainly normal faulting with some strike-slip component and one of the nodal planes oriented NW–SE and dipping to the NE. Cross-correlation techniques applied to detect and associate events with similar waveforms, provided up to 33 families relating the 67% of the 326 relocated aftershocks. Families show event clusters grouped by periods and migrating from NW to SE. Interestingly, the narrow epicentral zone inferred here is located less than 4 km away from the 111-m high Itoiz dam. These hypocentral results, and the correlation observed between fluctuations of the reservoir water level and the seismic activity, favour the explanation of this foreshock–aftershock series as a rapid response case of reservoir-triggered seismicity, burst by the first impoundment of the Itoiz reservoir. The region is folded and affected by shallow dipping thrusts, and the Itoiz reservoir is located on the hangingwall of a low angle southward verging thrust, which might be a case sensible to water level fluctuations. However, continued seismic monitoring in the coming years is mandatory in this area to infer more reliable seismotectonic and hazard assessments.     

地震丛集的分形新方法—物理分形

地震时间丛集的传统分形分析方法把地震事件看作是时间轴上无质量的数学点。这些方法得到的结果主要反映了大量小地震的活动特征。本文发展了一个新的物理分形分析的筛子方法，采用一系列震级筛子来研究不同震级地震的分布特征。对华北和南加洲的研究结果表明，同一地区地震目录中不同震级范围的子集合具有近似相等的分维数，华北Ｄ＝０．３，南加洲Ｄ＝０．４。     

Urban land transformation for pro-poor economies

The transformation of land into a setting for clustering local economies can become an important cornerstone of poverty policy. This transformation has several functional aspects, which in turn have important institutional and political aspects. Underlying both the functional and institutional factors is the role of local government and local democracy. Such a conceptualization puts to center stage several paradoxes: A terrain that seems “slum-like” turns out to be highly productive and employment generating. Complex tenure forms and mixed land use seen as “unplanned” turn out to be pre-requisites for economic development. There are institutional paradoxes that contrast efforts at “transparency” and managerial “best practices”. Here, the messiness of local bureaucracies in municipal government turns out to be critical for poor groups to influence interventions in their favor. Influencing the public process may be more effective in stealth-like ways rather taking a more visible approach. Most fundamentally these issues remind us that the potential of cities to reinforce or reduce poverty moved far beyond projects and programs and the normative frameworks used by planners and administrators. Instead, it is the transformative process of turning land into economic settings that might be at the center stage. This is a stage where poor groups are the central actors who stealth-like draw on complex alliances across ethnic and class lines to shapes cities in their interests.     

Clustering and visualization of earthquake data in a grid environment

We present a web client-server service WEB-IS, which we have developed for remote analysis and visualization of seismic data consisting of both small magnitude events and large earthquakes. We show that the problem-solving environment (PSE) intended for prediction of large magnitude earthquakes can be based on this WEB-IS idea. The clustering schemes, feature generation, feature extraction techniques and rendering algorithms form a computational framework of this environment. On the other hand, easy and fast access both to the seismic data distributed among distant computing resources and to computational and visualization resources can be realized in a GRID framework. We discuss the usefulness of NaradaBrokering (iNtegrated Asynchronous Real-time Adaptive Distributed Architecture) as a middleware, allowing for flexibility and high throughput for remote visualization of geophysical data. The WEB-IS functionality was tested both on synthetic and the actual earthquake catalogs. We consider the application of similar methodology for tsunami alerts.     

Vibrant Centers as Locations for High-Growth Firms: An Analysis of Thirty U.S. Metropolitan Areas

What kinds of places have high entrepreneurial activities? There has been an emerging body of studies about so-called entrepreneurship ecosystems, but virtually all of the past studies have examined this question from a perspective of which metropolitan areas have higher entrepreneurial activities. In this article, we examine the intrametropolitan scale at the Census tract level. By analyzing thirty metropolitan areas to extend external validity, we demonstrate the concentration of high-growth firms in specific employment nodes in both urban and suburban parts of each metropolitan area. Significant correlations exist between place-based vibrancy indicators and high-growth firm concentrations.     

Detection of spatio-temporal evolutions on multi-annual satellite image time series: A clustering based approach

The expansion of satellite technologies makes remote sensing data abundantly available. While the access to such data is no longer an issue, the analysis of this kind of data is still challenging and time consuming. In this paper, we present an object-oriented methodology designed to handle multi-annual Satellite Image Time Series (SITS). This method has the objective to automatically analyse a SITS to depict and characterize the dynamic of the areas (the way that the land cover of the areas evolve over time). First, it identifies the spatio-temporal entities (reference objects) to be tracked. Second, the evolution of such entities is described by means of a graph structure and finally it groups together spatio-temporal entities that evolve similarly. The analysis were performed on three study areas to highlight inter (among the study areas) and intra (inside a study area) similarity by following the evolution of the underlying phenomena. The analysis demonstrate the benefits of our methodology. Moreover, we also stress how an expert can exploit the extracted knowledge to pinpoint relevant landscape evolutions in the multi-annual time series and how to make connections among different study areas.     

中资律师事务所全球扩展及其网络空间结构演变

运用链锁网络模型,分析了1993-2015年间中资律师事务所全球布局的时空演化特征,及其全球网络的空间结构演变特征。研究发现：①中资律师事务所在西欧、北美和亚太三大区域重点布局的基础上,全球空间覆盖范围迅速扩展,全球布局同时考虑全球金融型中心城市和政治型中心城市等多种类型区位;②中资律师事务所的全球网络,在国内的北京、上海、广州、深圳和海外的香港、纽约、伦敦、迪拜等核心城市构成的骨干网络的基础上不断扩展,其网络的全球化程度也不断增强;③中资律师事务所的全球扩展对北美、西欧、非洲、中东以及东欧等区域城市的全球网络联系影响较大,对空间临近的亚太地区影响相对较小,这也与以往研究结论存在一定的差异。     

Analyzing Population Density Disparity in China with GIS-automated Regionalization: The Hu Line Revisited

The famous ’Hu Line’, proposed by Hu Huanyong in 1935, divided China into two regions(southeast and northwest) of comparable area size but drastically different in population. However, the classic Hu Line was derived manually in absence of reliable census data and computational technologies of modern days. It has been subject to criticism of lack of scientific rigor and accuracy. This research uses a GIS-automated regionalization method, termed REDCAP(Regionalization with Dynamically Constrained Agglomerative Clustering and Partitioning), to reconstruct the demarcation line based on the 2010 county-level census data in China. The results show that the logarithmic transformation of population density is a better measure of attributive homogeneity in derived regions than density itself, and produces two regions of nearly identical area size and greater contrast in population. Specifically, the revised Hu Line by Hu Huanyong in 1990 had the southeast region with 94.4% of total population and 42.9% of total land, and our delineation line yields a southeast region with 97.4% population and 50.8% land. Therefore, the population density ratio of the two regions is 27.1 by our line, much higher than the ratio of 22.4 by the Hu Line, and thus outperforms the Hu Line in deriving regions of maximum density contrast with comparable area size. Furthermore, more regions are delineated to further advance our understanding of population distribution disparity in China.     

Mapping of aggregated floodplain plant communities using image fusion of CASI and LiDAR data

Combined optical and laser altimeter data offer the potential to map and monitor plant communities based on their spectral and structural characteristics. A problem unresolved is, however, that narrowly defined plant communities, i.e. plant communities at a low hierarchical level of classification in the Braun-Blanquet system, often cannot be linked directly to remote sensing data for vegetation mapping. We studied whether and how a floristic dataset can be aggregated into a few major discrete, mappable classes without substantial loss of ecological meaning. Multi-source airborne data (CASI and LiDAR) and floristic field data were collected for a floodplain along the river Waal in the Netherlands. Mapping results based on floristic similarity alone did not achieve highest levels of accuracy. Ordination of floristic data showed that terrain elevation and soil moisture were the main underlying environmental drivers shaping the floodplain vegetation, but grouping of plant communities based on their position in the ordination space is not always obvious. Combined ordination-based grouping with floristic similarity clustering led to syntaxonomically relevant aggregated plant assemblages and yielded highest mapping accuracies.     

一种基于GPU和内存映射文件的高分辨率遥感图像快速处理方法

高分辨率遥感图像处理经常面临程序执行时间过长和内存空间不足的问题,虽然并行计算技术可以提高遥感图像的处理速度,但是无法降低算法占用的巨大内存空间。为了解决这一问题,本文提出了一种利用CUDA和内存映射文件的高分辨率遥感图像快速处理方法,并以K-Means算法为例进行了实现。其中,CUDA技术可以有效利用GPU强大的并行计算能力,而内存映射文件技术降低了磁盘I/O速度较慢对算法性能的影响。实验结果表明,本文方法比传统K-Means聚类算法计算速度提高了30倍左右,内存使用量降低了90%以上。