Antecedent Soil moisture (ASM) is one of the most important factors affecting the rainfall-runoff modelling process. Its existence and influence in computing runoff using Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS-CN) method have been a point of discussion for many decades. In this study, a novel procedure has been proposed to estimate the ASM by modifying the SCS-CN method and verify its applicability by comparing the ASM with the observed soil moisture. Natural rainfall, runoff and soil moisture data from eight small experimental farms with similar land use and varying slopes viz. 1%, 3% , 5% and 8%, located at Roorkee, India have been utilized. The ASM is computed by optimizing two parameters i.e., absolute maximum potential retention (Sabs) and initial abstraction coefficient (λ), and the optimization is carried out by minimizing Root mean square error (RMSE). Results show that there exists a good agreement between observed and computed ASM for slopes 1%, 3% and 5% (R2 > 0.5). A fair correlation for slope of 8% (R2 of 0.31) is observed, which may be due to the inadequacy of data. This study will be helpful in calculating ASM for ungauged catchments and will further broaden the applications of SCS-CN method.

The story the Antarctic Core Collection’s (ACC) transition from Florida State University (FSU) to Oregon State University (OSU) is one of the largest-scale data rescue efforts in recent history. The ACC is the world’s largest collection of seafloor sediment samples from the Southern Ocean. The collection was officially established in 1963 as the US Antarctic Program took shape. For the next fifty years, the collection grew to represent the scientific discoveries of over one-hundred and twenty research cruises and expeditions around Antarctica. FSU hosted the irreplaceable collection at its Antarctic Research Facility, an iconic lab in the center of campus. In 2016, the university chose not to renew its contract for supporting the facility. Recognizing the value and potential of the collection, the National Science Foundation began a search for another university to host these important samples and enable future research. In 2017, OSU’s Marine and Geology Repository (OSU-MGR) initiated a plan to relocate this historic collection of over eighteen kilometers of core samples from Tallahassee, FL to Corvallis, OR. The project began by planning and constructing a state-of-the-art facility with temperature-controlled space to house the next fifty years of coring expeditions to the Southern Oceans and beyond. In the summer of 2018, the ACC was carefully packaged, digitally inventoried, and shipped to OSU. In this process, the OSU-MGR staff have worked to improve metadata records to build an effective modern inventory of the ACC using new digital collection management techniques, including QR coded labels and scanners. These metadata are managed on tablets with the OSU-MGR App and indexed in an Elasticsearch cluster to streamline the repository’s workflows and to display summary statistics. Current and future curation projects will comply with FAIR data principles, with the goal of making all OSU-MGR collections and associated datasets more easily discoverable online.

The main objective of submerged breakwaters is energy dissipation of transmitted wave in leeward. In the present study, the capability of FLOW-3D and MIKE21-BW software for modeling of these structures have been investigated. In this regard, experimental results have been considered as a criterion to analyse the results of this two software. Comparison of numerical and experimental results revealed that FLOW-3D provides better results than MIKE21. Therefore, FLOW-3D has been used to investigate the effects of submerged breakwater geometry on wave transmission. In doing so, the effect of main design parameters such as shoreward slope, leeward slope, and the ratio of the width to the height of the submerged breakwaters have been studied on transmission coefficient. The results of this study show that the effect of shoreward and seaward slopes on transmission coefficient is negligible; while they considerably contribute to the wave reflection. Finally, the correlation factor has been calculated to investigate the correlation of dimensionless parameters with wave transmission coefficient. Accordingly, the most correlated parameters to wave transmission coefficient are the depth above breakwater crest to incident wave height ratio (F/H) and relative depth of breakwater (F/d), and the least correlated parameter is the breakwater slopes. The results of this study can be used in better understanding of the influential parameters in design as well as developing computation frameworks to study the submerged structures in nearshore regions.

Disturbances in the magnetosphere-ionosphere system cause changes in the geomagnetic field that result in ground induced currents (GICs) that are potentially hazardous to electrical systems on Earth. Harmful GICs are driven by magnetic field fluctuations with timescales generally falling in the range of 1-10 minutes; much less attention has been placed on geomagnetic field fluctuations with short timescales (< 60 seconds) because they cause transient induced currents (TICs) that have not been considered to pose a legitimate threat to electrical systems since they are similar to electrical transients due to lightning. On the contrary, short-timescale magnetic field fluctuations have been found to be capable of coupling directly to power grids and electrical systems, inducing substantial voltages without first flowing in the ground. This ionospheric current coupling poses a potential threat to any of these systems, especially electronic equipment with low operating voltage or that does not have surge protection. Transmitting devices that are at risk by such currents are becoming increasingly more prevalent in society with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) network. Our characterization of transient magnetic field perturbations provides detail on short-timescale changes of the magnetosphere-ionosphere coupled system and supports the assessment of possible hazards to technological infrastructure on Earth. This research is enabled by modern magnetometers, both ground- and space-based, with high sampling rate capabilities that allow for the measurement of transient surface magnetic field fluctuations with short-timescales. We present the characteristics of transient magnetic field changes observed by the MACCS array in Arctic Canada by selecting events recorded on the ground and analyzing the behavior of the electromagnetic fluctuations within the ionosphere and magnetosphere during such events.

In the subsurface, water content, gas solubility, adsorption on minerals and chemical reactions control gas fluxes between soil and the atmosphere. Because these processes vary in intensity both in time and space, it is very challenging to quantify emissions, specifically when flux measurements are used for detection, identification or monitoring of a subsurface gas source. An experimental setup for gas percolation though soil column experiments under well-controlled conditions was developed and validated at the ECOTRON IleDeFrance research center. Its design included the effect of: i) watering/evaporation cycles, ii) barometric pressure, iii) injection pressure, iv) tracer behaviors and v) plant metabolism. To better understand subsurface processes controlling gas fluxes, we studied transport of multiple tracers across soil columns using long-term and high-resolution monitoring thanks to online low-flow mass-spectrometry. We injected tracer gases into columns containing different porous media, pure sillica sand and zeolite. This set-up allowed us to evaluate the relative contribution of diffusion, solubility and adsorption on various trace gases (SF6, noble gas including Xe). All the experimental data are discussed in conjonction with simulations using the NUFT unsaturated flow and transport code.

In subduction zones, megathrust seismicity depends on the hydrogeological, physical and mechanical properties of sediments before they enter the subduction zone and how these properties evolve through the subduction process. In particular, fluids are progressively released by compaction and/or mineral dehydration reactions as burial increases, resulting in the build-up of pore fluid pressure in low-permeability sediments that strongly affects fault behavior through its control on effective normal stress. Thus, characterizing the compaction state and bound water content of sediments in subduction systems is crucial. During IODP Expedition 372 and 375, Site U1518 was drilled in the frontal wedge of the Northern Hikurangi margin ~6.5 km west of the deformation front. This site penetrated an active thrust fault, the Papaku fault, its hanging wall and uppermost footwall. The Papaku fault, intersected at ~304 meters below sea floor, is a westward-dipping splay fault which is thought to lie in the SSE rupture area, to host SSEs and to have accommodated several kilometers of shortening within the prism. It is composed of a ~18m-thick main fault zone with a mixture of brittle and ductile structures and ductile features locally overprinted by brittle fractures and faults. Below, there are a ~21m-thick zone of gradually decreasing brittle-ductile deformation and a ~10m-thick subsidiary fault zone. The folded, faulted and pervasively fractured hanging wall corresponds to Early-Mid Pleistocene hemipelagic silty-claystone with fine-grained turbidites sequences. The footwall is composed by relatively undeformed Mid-Late Pleistocene bioturbated hemipelagic mudstones with turbidites sequences. We use IODP expeditions 372-375 and post-cruise porosity, logging and chemical data to characterize the porosity of sediments at Site U1518, including interstitial porosity, bound water content and fracture porosity. Interstitial porosity is obtained by correcting total porosity measured onboard accounting for clay-mineral bound water using Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC). Unlike total porosity measured onboard, interstitial porosity is representative of the compaction state of sediments. To better characterize interstitial porosity, we document the evolution of the structure of meso- to macropores with depth using mercury injection capillary pressure and low-field nuclear magnetic resonance. We assess the compaction state of sediments at Site U1518 by comparing the interstitial porosity-effective vertical stress curve with that of equivalent siliciclastic units at Site U1520. This site sampled and logged the undeformed input sedimentary section and the top of the oceanic crust ~95 km from shore. We show that the hanging-wall of the Papaku thrust fault is overconsolidated whereas the footwall is normally consolidated. Finally, we discuss deformation history of sediments during accretion regarding the compaction profile and the deformation structures observed at Site U1518.

There are potential benefits from the addition of 3-C rotational motions to traditional 3-C translational displacements for moment tensor (MT) inversions. The rotational radiation pattern is orthogonal to the shear radiation pattern, thus incorporating rotations is equivalent to gaining another observation point on the focal sphere. We demonstrate this by simulating the curl and displacement wavefields in a half-space for a regional distance station. We also demonstrate the effect of velocity gradients beneath a station on rotational motions compared to displacements. Further investigation is needed to study how this affects the MT inversion. We added rotational Greens functions to regional long-period MT inversion computing spatial gradients from f- reflectivity synthetics. We used array derived rotational motions from the Piñon Flats Observatory Array in California and Golay arrays deployed during the IRIS Community Wavefield Demonstration Experiment in Oklahoma. Well-constrained MT solutions were estimated for three earthquakes using long-period regional waves with and without rotational ground motions as test cases. Prepared by LLNL under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL release number LLNL-ABS-781439. Index Terms: 7215 Earthquake source observations, 7290 Computational seismology Plain-Language Summary Scientists have traditionally used seismometers to record earthquake generated translational ground motions using three-dimensional axes typically oriented in a vertical, north-south and east-west directions in other words a “Cartesian coordinate system”. Recent advancements in seismometer development for recording rotational or twisting ground motions about the same three-axes provide additional information, which, in addition to translational seismometers can help resolve the radiation patterns of quakes. In cases where physical access is limited, the sparse distribution of seismometers caused by, for example, ocean coasts, islands, Lunar, and Mars surfaces can prevent the complete observation of the quake radiation pattern. The combination of these two types of seismometers at a single point are useful to infer faulting mechanisms of quakes or other seismic source types than using just one seismometer. Submitted to American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA 9-13 December 2019. S032 – Rotation and Strain in Seismology – Applications, Instrumentation and Theory S21G-0589

The Southwest U.S. comprising of the four states-Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah-is the hottest and driest region of the United States. Most of the precipitation arrives during the winter season, but the summer precipitation makes a significant contribution to the reliability of water resources and the health of ecology. However, summer precipitation and its extremes, over this region exhibit high degree of spatial and temporal variability. In this study we developed a novel spatial Bayesian hierarchical model to capture the space-time variability of –summer season 3-day maximum precipitation over the southwest U.S. In modeling framework, the data layer the extremes at each station are assumed to be distributed as Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution with non-stationary parameters. In addition, the extremes across space is assumed to be related via a Gaussian Copula. In the process layer, the parameters are modeled as a linear function of large scale climate variables and regional mean precipitation covariates. This is akin to a Generalized Linear Model (GLM). The parameters of the covariates at each station are spatially modeled using spatial Gaussian processes to capture the spatial dependency and enable generating the spatial field of the hydroclimate extremes. The likelihood estimates of the GLM at each station form the initial priors. The posterior distribution of the model parameters and consequently the predictive posterior GEV distribution of the hydroclimate extremes at any arbitrary location, or grid and for any year are obtained. The model is demonstrated by application to extreme summer precipitation at 73 stations from this region. The model validation indicates that return levels and their associated uncertainty have a well-defined spatial structure and furthermore, they capture the historical variability very well. The posterior distribution of the GEV parameters were generated on a 1/8th degree grid, providing maps of various return levels for all the years. Maps of return levels provide information about the spatial and temporal variations of the risk of extreme precipitation in the Southwest U.S. that will be of immense help in management and planning of natural resources and infrastructure.

The urban population has been on the rise, and as per the European Union Joint Research Commission, by the year 2015, 75% of the total population will be in the cities. Urban imports, exports and infrastructure have a vital role in the local economy, consequently in both national and global economies as well. Water is a key element of all the constituents of an urban agglomeration, and it is a known fact that the constituents utilize water not only from the immediate neighborhood but from elsewhere. Thus, most likely, water footprint of an urban agglomeration extends beyond regional, national and international borders. Methods to estimate water footprint and using the information in the policy context are underway. Data availability and its access at different resolutions impose its own challenges. In this presentation, we present a consumer-centric based approach to understand the nexus of water-energy-food of urban agglomeration and benchmarking nexus elements. The consumer-centric approach helps to assess elements of nexus at the smallest unit level of urban cities, i.e. at the consumer level. The estimated information assists in policy-making as well as in bringing the social awareness for the e¨cient use of resources and sustained development of urban agglomeration. This assessment is adjuvant to urban governments to know their dependence on external water resources and it plays a crucial role in smart cities development.

Satellite based remote sensing data are increasingly used for urban meteorological applications, particularly to study urban heat island impacts. However, the land surface temperature, a critical variable used to characterize the urban thermal state has never been calibrated for urbanized landcover. This will in turn escalate the uncertainties in various applications (like weather forecasting in urban areas) which use remote sensing data. This research focuses on the development and testing of an Arduino-based, GPS-enabled, non-contact passive infrared temperature sensor that provides ground-truth temperature validation of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-16, and its LST operational product. It is posited that high-resolution, multi-point, near-surface temperature information will improve LST algorithms and ultimately advance the application of satellite data to study urban climate. New York City (NYC) is used as a test site for the temperature sensor along with its geographically-respective satellite calibration points. The analysis anticipates expansion into several U.S. cities, pending preliminary evaluation and testing in NYC. GIS tools will be used to visualize data points atop geographic maps, with the intention of correlating more built-up landcover regions with temperature differences quantified by the ground-based sensor and the GOES-16 LST data. The Arduino sensor is equipped with a thermocouple to provide real-time calibration measurements on the encountered surfaces to ensure that parameters such as emissivity are captured, as well as accurate and repeatable infrared temperature readings. The enhancement of satellite information improves the well-being of the general public, which can save lives during extreme weather events such as heat waves. The research presented here intends to broaden the LST calibration network available to satellites by providing a ground-based, portable sensor framework that is implementable across cities and urban areas.

Anorthosites are attractive paleomagnetic recorders as silicate-hosted magnetite inclusions can be single-domain and be shielded from alteration. However, petrofabrics within anorthosites may result in magnetic remanence anisotropy that is potentially detrimental to recovering paleomagnetic direction and intensity. The Beaver River diabase of the North American Midcontinent Rift contains abundant nearly 100 percent plagioclase anorthosite xenoliths that are hypothesized to have been liberated from the lower crust by the magma enroute to becoming embedded in shallow crustal sills. In this study, we compare the remanent paleomagnetic directions recorded by anorthosite xenoliths to those of the Beaver River diabase host rocks. Given that both lithologies should record the same thermal remanent magnetization, this comparison provides a means to assess the effects of remanence anisotropy on the paleodirection recorded by the anorthosites. Thermal and anhysteretic remanence (TRM and ARM) anisotropy experiments, which are typically used to assess for anisotropy, can be compared to the natural remanence of the diabase and anorthosite in this geologic experiment that was conducted 1.1 billion years ago. Paleodirection data from the interior of the largest (>300 m) anorthosite xenoliths also have the potential to test their hypothetical lower crustal origin. An origin below the Curie depth would result in a full thermal remanence from the time of diabase emplacement, while a shallower origin from above the Curie depth could have resulted in a distinct remanence direction in the xenolith interior that predates the intrusion (with samples from the exterior having acquired a Beaver River diabase coeval thermal remanence in either scenario). Overall, this novel geological association between diabase and anorthosite provides a means to assess the effects of remanence anisotropy providing valuable context for efforts to use anorthosites to understand the ancient geomagnetic field.

The magnetosphere of the Earth presents a large scale plasma physics laboratory in which the complex interacting plasma phenomena are involved: global convecting plasma dynamics, wave–particle interactions in the bow shock and transmitted shock waves/impulses and magnetic field reconnection in the plasma current sheets. The NASA magnetospheric multiscale mission (MMS) provides unique observations of the thin structures and wave–particles interactions at the shock-like impulses while the spacecrafts were located at the dawn terminator (the time is 2016-03-07 20:00:00 UTC). It was assumed that these impulses may be created by the interaction between the background flow and plasma clouds. It was also assumed that those clouds were produced by either flux-transfer events or by coalescence/reconnection processes at the magnetopause current layer or by the mirror instabilities inside the low latitude boundary layer. 3-D hybrid kinetic code with separate description of the background and cloud ions was used for interpretation of the observed impulse structures. In this report we will discuss the effects of particle heating and acceleration inside the foreshock of the shock-like impulses, effects of the ion and electron non-Maxwellian velocity distributions, and particle finite gyroradius, and triggering the electromagnetic instability.

Similar to most West Antarctic ice shelves, those in the Bellingshausen Sea have rapidly thinned by hundreds of cubic kilometers over the last decades yet they remain under-studied compared to other regions. The increased melting rates in the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) have been linked to warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) that is able to access the continental shelf due to the absence of the Antarctic Slope Current. The exact pathways of CDW flowing on to the shelf and of meltwater flowing away from the ice shelves are essential to understanding the dynamics in this region and how it will change in the future. Here, we propose that the Bellingshausen Sea plays an important role in connecting circulation between the Amundsen Sea and the WAP and may influence water properties that circulate under floating ice shelves throughout the West Antarctica. Using a combination of hydrographic and isotopic data from a recent cruise to the Bellingshausen Sea (December 2018 to January 2019), multiple methods are applied to identify circulation pathways and to quantify glacial meltwater fractions. The meltwater measurements show that the Belgica and Latady Troughs are important pathways for CDW to reach the ice shelves, though almost twice as much meltwater is transported off the shelf via the Belgica Trough. CDW enters the shelf at the deepest part of the Belgica Trough, moving towards the coast along the trough’s eastern side. The largest meltwater fractions are found along the western flank of the Belgica and Latady Troughs. The meltwater signature can be tracked to the western edge of the Bellingshausen Sea, where it is then entrained into a boundary current system that flows over the continental slope towards the Amundsen Sea.

We employ Magnetospheric Multiscale, Geostationary Operational Environmental and Los Alamos National Laboratory satellites, as well as the ground magnetometer networks over Greenland and North America to study a substorm on 9 August 2016 between 9 and 10 UT.We found that during the substorm two earthward flows, whose dipolarization-injection fronts exceeded 6.5 and 4 Earth’s radii (RE) in YGSM, impinged and rebounded from Earth’s dipolar field lines at L = 6–7 downtail, where L is the McIlwain number. The impingements and rebounds ended with a substorm current system of downward R1 and upward R2 currents which grew to azimuthally cover the whole North American continent. At the fronts, regions of enhanced negative j·E′ were formed and peaked toward the end of the impingements. These regions appeared to be conjugate with eastward moving aurora (along the growth phase arc and together with eastward drifting energetic electrons at geosynchronous equatorial orbit), which manifests ionospheric Ohmic losses.

A growing literature emphasizes the importance of integrating climate change impacts into electricity system planning. Rising average temperatures can increase and shift electricity demand while reducing generator and transmission efficiency. Changes to water availability and quality can reduce the output of thermally cooled generators and hydropower. Electric power grids across the US and globally are undergoing transformational changes that present new opportunities and challenges to reliability assurance. However, electric utilities and system operators have limited internal capabilities to incorporate these effects into planning practices. This work addresses gaps in utility and system planner practices by integrating climate-water-electricity expertise from universities and U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories with electricity system planners and stakeholders in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC). Using a highly collaborative approach, global climate model data, high-resolution hydrology models, and long-term electric sector capacity expansion tools are employed to analyze a range of climate outcomes for future electricity scenarios aligned with recent WECC planning studies. Doing so allows WECC to expand its climate-agnostic planning assessments to consider how future temperature and precipitation patterns could influence generation and transmission planning. We explore how changes to climate-water conditions can affect power plant investment and operation, system economics, and environmental impacts, providing an expanded perspective on interconnection-wide decision making under climate uncertainty.

We present a summary of seismological and geophysical investigations at Amatrice (Central Italy), a village seated on an alluvial terrace and severely stroke by the Mw 6.0 event of August 24th 2016. The high vulnerability alone could not explain the heavy damage (X-XI MCS), whereas the vicinity of the seismic source and the peculiar site effects should be claimed to understand the ground motion variability. After the first mainshock, we investigated the Amatrice terrace for microzonation purposes together with several Italian institutions (Priolo et al., Bull. Earthquake Eng. 2019). In particular: (i) we installed 7 seismic stations as a part of the 3A network (DOI: 10.13127/SD/ku7Xm12Yy9; Cara et al., Sci. Data 2019); we performed (ii) an extensive campaign of 60 single-station ambient noise measurements (downtown stations recorded also few earthquakes), and (iii) several 2D passive seismic arrays aimed at obtaining Vs profiles down to a depth of few tens of meters (Milana et al., Bull. Earthquake Eng. 2019). Earthquake recordings were used to empirically evaluate ground motion amplification effects through spectral ratio approaches, and noise data were collected for defining the spatial distribution of the resonance frequencies. Data analysis reveals a diffuse amplification effect that reaches its maximum values in downtown area with a resonant frequency (f0) of about 2 Hz. Seismic amplification is also characterized by spatial variation and directional amplification, mainly in downtown to the west side of the alluvial terrace, and related to both stratigraphic and topographic effects. This effect tends to decrease and almost vanishes in the central part of the terrace, and it increases again moving towards its eastern edge with a clear shift of f0 towards higher frequencies. Empirical transfer functions were then used to recover the ground motion that could have hit the historical center of Amatrice during the August 24th mainshock, through the convolution with the only record in the vicinity (IT.AMT station experienced a PGA of 0.87 g). The reconstructed peak values are much greater than expected from ground motion models, showing that detailed studies on local site response can largely modify the seismic hazard assessment.

The study focuses on the estimation and modeling of the temporal rates of major explosions and paroxysms at Stromboli volcano (also named small-scale and large-scale paroxysms respectively). The analysis was further motivated by the paroxysm of July 3rd 2019, which raised, once again, the attention of the scientific community and civil protection authorities on the volcanic hazards of Stromboli. In fact, at the present state of knowledge, major explosions and paroxysms cannot be forecasted based on monitoring data, and a full probabilistic assessment based on past eruption data would be quite useful for scientific and civil protection purposes. In the study we perform a time series analysis either considering the last ~150 years of reconstructed activity and the most recent 35 years. We included the estimation of event rates and rate changes in time. Results clearly highlight that the activity is non-homogeneus in time, with a significant low of activity between about 1960 and 1990. Maximum values of event rates were computed during the first half of last century, for both major explosions and paroxysms, whereas the rate of paroxysms is significantly lower in the last decades with respect to maximum rates. We also accomplish a statistical analysis of the inter-event times, enabling us to determine if the data can be modeled as a Poisson process or not, e.g. if it shows time dependent distributions, recurring cycles, or temporal clusters. The uncertainty quantification on the current and future rates is mainly related to the choice of the modeling assumptions. The study represents a crucial progress towards quantitative hazard and risk assessments at Stromboli, which is particularly relevant for the thousands of people (e.g. tourists, guides and volcanologists) that regularly climb the volcano every year.

The MMS spacecraft routinely observe electron “microinjections” at energies in the 10s-100s keV range across the nightside magnetosphere at distances <20 Re. Microinjections are typically observed in clusters where multiple dispersed injection signatures are recorded in succession over a short time interval (e.g., ~10 in one hour) and may be related to surface wave activity at the magnetopause. Recent work has shown that microinjections have distinctive features in the angular distributions, where field-aligned distributions are observed near dusk, while trapped distributions are observed near dawn. Due to their recent discovery, the origin and generation of microinjections has yet to be conclusively identified and detailed studies thus far have largely been done on a case-by-case basis. In an effort to elucidate more general properties and characteristics of microinjections, we describe an automated routine designed to identify microinjection signatures in the MMS/FEEPS measurements. The algorithm uses image processing techniques (the radon transform) and is based on a similar method developed to identify whistler-mode chorus elements in Van Allen Probes wave observations (Sen Gupta et al., [2017]). We present an initial set of results from a statistical database of microinjection events obtained from the automated algorithm to further our understanding of this intriguing phenomenon.