Under the ice and over the sky – aspects of building the International Quaternary Map of Europe and potentially useful parallels to planetary geological map projects

Author(s):  
Kristine Asch ◽  
Andrea Naß ◽  
Stephan van Gasselt

<p>The project of the International Quaternary Map of Europe project (IQUAME 2500) is a major international initiative coordinated by BGR under the auspices of the CGMW (Commission of the Geological Map of the Word, Sub-Commission Europe) and with support of INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Research). It started in 2011 at the INQUA congress in Bern and aims to show the distribution of Quaternary features at the land surface and general marine deposits across the entire European continent. The map is planned as web-based geographical information system (GIS) and is going to include the Quaternary on- and off-shore information on e.g. glaciogenic elements, geomorphologic features, age and lithology of Quaternary units, last extent of ice sheets (Weichselian, Saalian, if possible Elsterian), faults, active faults off-shore Quaternary information (in cooperation with the European Union EMODnet Geology project) and more.</p><p>Partner institutions from more than 30 countries including geological survey organisations from Russia in the East, Portugal in the West, Norway in the North and Cyprus in the South are participating; a scientific board of Quaternary researchers ensures the high scientific quality of resulting map. For a multinational and cross-boundary project like this, international collaboration is the key to success. This project requires that data originally set up in a plethora of regional and national classifications need to be adapted, integrated and harmonized in respect to semantics, structure and geometry. To achieve this aim common rules needed to used such as those defined by the European INSPIRE Directive or be set up and applied by all participants:  structured vocabularies (incl. definitions of terms) to describe the above contents, cartographic guidelines to suite the scale and last but not least generally applicable tools to aid the partners to submit their data to the project.</p><p>Ultimately, the aim is to create an pan-European, internationally harmonized, comprehensive, spatial geological database where relevant properties of the Quaternary layers can be retrieved, combined, selected and cross-referenced across political boundaries and also to provide a summary of the current status of European Quaternary geological research.</p><p>Looking at planetary mapping, e.g. of Mars and Moon, there are several similarities. The surfaces of terrestrial planets are shaped by geologic processes that are similar to those operating on Earth, therefore endogenic and exogenic landforms (such as lava flows, glacial deposits, and impact craters) are regularly mapped by the scientific community.  Beside specific scientific mapping projects conducted by individual researchers and groups different organisations and institutes are producing planetary maps, such as NASA, ESA, ROSCOSMOS and MIIGAiK (Russia), USGS (USA), CAS/NOAC/SGCAS/RADI (China), DLR (Germany), or the British Ordnance Survey. This presentation aims to introduce the small-scale Quaternary mapping of one part of planet Earth, i.e. Europe, to present its collaborative aspects, to highlight the parallels to planetary mapping and to suggest potentially useful aspects for planetary geological mapping projects.</p>

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotte de Vos ◽  
Hidde Leijnse ◽  
Aart Overeem ◽  
Remko Uijlenhoet

Abstract. The high density of built-up areas and resulting imperviousness of the land surface makes urban areas vulnerable to extreme rainfall, which can lead to considerable damage. In order to design and manage cities to be able to deal with the growing number of extreme rainfall events, rainfall data is required at higher temporal and spatial resolutions than those needed for rural catchments. However, the density of operational rainfall monitoring networks managed by local or national authorities is typically low in urban areas. A growing number of automatic personal weather stations (PWSs) link rainfall measurements to online platforms. Here, we examine the potential of such crowdsourced datasets for obtaining the desired resolution and quality of rainfall measurements for the capital of the Netherlands. Data from 63 stations in Amsterdam (~ 575 km2) that measure rainfall over at least 4 months in a 17-month period are evaluated, in addition to a detailed assessment that is made of three Netatmo stations, the largest contributor of the dataset, in an experimental set-up. Although the sensor performance in the experimental set-up and the density of the PWS-network are promising, the method of data transfer to the online platform causes considerable errors in the datasets obtained. These errors are especially large during low intensity rainfall, although they can be reduced by accumulating rainfall over longer intervals, improving the correlation with gauge-adjusted radar data from 0.48 at 5 min intervals to 0.60 at hourly intervals. Spatial rainfall correlation functions derived from PWS data show much more small-scale variability than those based on gauge-adjusted radar data and those found in similar research using dedicated rain gauge networks. This can largely be attributed to the noise in the PWS data resulting from both the measurement setup and the data conversion by the PWS-platform. A double mass comparison with gauge-adjusted radar data shows that the median of the stations resembles the rainfall reference better than the real-time available (unadjusted) radar product. Averaging nearby raw PWS measurements already improves the match with gauge-adjusted radar data in that area. The results confirm that the growing number of internet-connected PWSs holds a promise for urban rainfall monitoring.


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-292
Author(s):  
C. JOHN HENRY

The Society of Arts, recognising the inadequate state of mapping in Britain, introduced an award in 1759 to encourage the accurate survey and production of county maps at a ‘large’ scale of one inch to one mile (1:63,360) by private individuals. From 1761 to 1809, thirteen awards were made. By 1800 nearly all of England and Lowland Scotland and a third of Wales were mapped by the private enterprise of surveyors, cartographers and publishers before the publication in 1801 of the first Ordnance Survey map at an inch to the mile, of Kent. The role of the Society of Arts awards scheme, in the general rush to produce accurate large scale maps of England and Wales is appraised. Manuscript field maps by William Smith and Adam Sedgwick on SA prize-winning county one inch scale maps for their geological work and a completed example of one inch geological mapping by Arthur Aikin are examined. No geological mapping was published on one-inch county maps, but smaller scale reductions were. Less than a third of published large scale county maps won awards and more than half were published without reference to the Society of Arts; however, the rate of progress of survey and publishing suggests that the Society of Arts awards scheme accelerated the trend to produce one inch mapping in England. In the process, the modest accuracy and lack of standardisation demonstrated the need for government intervention. The Ordnance Trigonometric Survey was the government's response in 1791 to produce a rigorous national triangulation and a consistent high standard of national mapping. Published one-inch geological mapping waited until the Ordnance Survey initiated geological mapping in the 1830s. The Society of Arts offered awards for small scale mineralogical maps in 1803; William Smith's 1815 geological map won the award for England and Wales.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4100
Author(s):  
Rasa Supankanok ◽  
Sukanpirom Sriwong ◽  
Phisan Ponpo ◽  
Wei Wu ◽  
Walairat Chandra-ambhorn ◽  
...  

Evacuated-tube solar collector (ETSC) is developed to achieve high heating medium temperature. Heat transfer fluid contained inside a copper heat pipe directly affects the heating medium temperature. A 10 mol% of ethylene-glycol in water is the heat transfer fluid in this system. The purpose of this study is to modify inner structure of the evacuated tube for promoting heat transfer through aluminum fin to the copper heat pipe by inserting stainless-steel scrubbers in the evacuated tube to increase heat conduction surface area. The experiment is set up to measure the temperature of heat transfer fluid at a heat pipe tip which is a heat exchange area between heat transfer fluid and heating medium. The vapor/ liquid equilibrium (VLE) theory is applied to investigate phase change behavior of the heat transfer fluid. Mathematical model validated with 6 experimental results is set up to investigate the performance of ETSC system and evaluate the feasibility of applying the modified ETSC in small-scale industries. The results indicate that the average temperature of heat transfer fluid in a modified tube increased to 160.32 °C which is higher than a standard tube by approximately 22 °C leading to the increase in its efficiency by 34.96%.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Bonetti ◽  
Zhongwang Wei ◽  
Dani Or

AbstractEarth system models use soil information to parameterize hard-to-measure soil hydraulic properties based on pedotransfer functions. However, current parameterizations rely on sample-scale information which often does not account for biologically-promoted soil structure and heterogeneities in natural landscapes, which may significantly alter infiltration-runoff and other exchange processes at larger scales. Here we propose a systematic framework to incorporate soil structure corrections into pedotransfer functions, informed by remote-sensing vegetation metrics and local soil texture, and use numerical simulations to investigate their effects on spatially distributed and areal averaged infiltration-runoff partitioning. We demonstrate that small scale soil structure features prominently alter the hydrologic response emerging at larger scales and that upscaled parameterizations must consider spatial correlations between vegetation and soil texture. The proposed framework allows the incorporation of hydrological effects of soil structure with appropriate scale considerations into contemporary pedotransfer functions used for land surface parameterization.


Author(s):  
Yanxia Li ◽  
Zhongliang Liu ◽  
Yan Wang ◽  
Jiaming Liu

A numerical model on methane/air combustion inside a small Swiss-roll combustor was set up to investigate the flame position of small-scale combustion. The simulation results show that the combustion flame could be maintained in the central area of the combustor only when the speed and equivalence ratio are all within a narrow and specific range. For high inlet velocity, the combustion could be sustained stably even with a very lean fuel and the flame always stayed at the first corner of reactant channel because of the strong convection heat transfer and preheating. For low inlet velocity, small amounts of fuel could combust stably in the central area of the combustor, because heat was appropriately transferred from the gas to the inlet mixture. Whereas, for the low premixed gas flow, only in certain conditions (Φ = 0.8 ~ 1.2 when ν0 = 1.0m/s, Φ = 1.0 when ν0 = 0.5m/s) the small-scale combustion could be maintained.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koffi Dodji Noumonvi ◽  
Joshua L. Ratcliffe ◽  
Mats Öquist ◽  
Mats B. Nilsson ◽  
Matthias Peichl

<p>Northern peatlands cover a small fraction of the earth’s land surface, and yet they are one of the most important natural sources of atmospheric methane. With climate change causing rising temperatures, changes in water balance and increased growing season length, peatland contribution to atmospheric methane concentration is likely to increase, justifying the increased attention given to northern peatland methane dynamics. Northern peatlands often occur as heterogeneous complexes characterized by hydromorphologically distinct features from < 1 m² to tens of km², with differing physical, hydrological and chemical properties. The more commonly understood small-scale variation between hummocks, lawns and hollows has been well explored using chamber measurements. Single tower eddy covariance measurements, with a typical 95% flux footprint of < 0.5 km², have been used to assess the ecosystem scale methane exchange. However, how representative single tower flux measurements are of an entire mire complex is not well understood. To address this knowledge gap, the present study takes advantage of a network of four eddy covariance towers located less than 3 km apart at four mires within a typical boreal mire complex in northern Sweden. The variation of methane fluxes and its drivers between the four sites will be explored at different temporal scales, i.e. half-hourly, daily and at a growing-season scale.</p>


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