This presentation will show an ongoing freshwater health assessment stemming from a partnership between the National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA) and Conservation International (CI) that is dedicated to improving natural resources assessment for conservation and sustainable management. The goal of this work is to develop a calibrated satellite- and hydrologic modeling-based tool to support the assessment of hydrologic environmental health and value natural capital in the Lower Mekong River Basin. Vollmer et al., (2018) have presented the social-ecological framework named the Freshwater Health Index (FHI), which takes account of the interplay between governance, stakeholders, freshwater ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide. The FHI framework and its accompanying indicators are oriented toward management and stakeholder engagement, and they make a significant contribution by providing a systematic, evidence-based quantitative tool that supports the integration between social and ecological nature of fresh waters at the basin level. Since the FHI is intended to be used iteratively, we leverage multiple data products and hydrological modelling capabilities specifically created to improve decision support in the Lower Mekong basin (Mohammed et al., 2018). Mohammed et al. modelling capabilities enable the integration of satellite-based daily gridded precipitation, air temperature, digital elevation model, soil characteristics, and land cover and land use information to drive watershed model water simulations over the Lower Mekong River Basin. Multiple dam reservoirs scenarios have been envisioned and tested based on stakeholder engagement to enhance the results of the integrative social and ecological nature of fresh waters at the Srepok, Sesan, and Sekong (3S) River Basins of the Lower Mekong. This assessment provides a comprehensive picture of freshwater ecosystem health, the services it provides and the status of its governance at the Lower Mekong.

Previous studies done for the TROPOMI mission (e.g. Meister et al (2017), Hu et al (2016), Landgraf et al (2016)) has shown that inhomogeneous illumination within the field of view causes distortions in the instrument spectral response function (ISRF). The differences in the distorted ISRF and the ISRF measured in the pre-flight calibration lead to retrieval biases. It is known through laboratory trials that these distortions increase with wavelength and various methods have been employed to mitigate these issues, including continuous within-slit scanning and temporal oversampling. Recently, a hardware solution, called a slit homogenizer, has shown promise in reducing distortions due to inhomogeneous illumination. In this work, we used an instrument model of the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory, GeoCarb, to simulate observations in the 0.76um, 1.6um, 2.05um, and 2.3um spectral bands with varying illuminations. We found that the posterior scatter and bias of Greenhouse Gas retrievals grow linearly with the coefficient of variation of illumination within a footprint. We also found that the ISRF distortion effects of inhomogeneous illumination are significantly reduced through the use of a slit homogenizer, though not completely resolved.

Glaciers are major contributors to global sea level change and regional freshwater resources. In light of the worldwide societal importance of glacier change, we see a need for accessible glacier-education materials in many languages. We have developed a set of Jupyter notebooks, available in both Spanish and English, that coaches users through basic simulations with the Open Global Glacier Model (edu.oggm.org). The notebooks are freely available via GitHub (github.com/ehultee/CdeC-glaciologia), with no special software installation requirements for users. Participants in a week-long glaciology workshop at Clubes de Ciencia Peru 2019 used our notebooks to study glacier physics and make future projections for mountain glaciers of their choice. Only one participant had previously used Python, and none had experience with numerical modelling of Earth systems in any language. All were able to run the notebooks and explain their findings. Most participants were also able to modify the notebooks to conduct experiments of interest to them. We consider this a particularly successful case of science outreach, in that workshop participants are now equipped to explore their own important questions independently. The notebooks we have developed can support multilingual glaciology outreach; we hope that sharing our experience can support public geoscience more broadly.

Gas leakage through wellbore micro-channels is a major challenging problem for well cementing and integrity. One of the reason that leads to weaker cementing is the drilling fluid contamination within the cement plug, which provides weak parts for the flowing pathways of gas and fluids. The objective of this paper was to experimentally investigate the drilling fluids contamination in terms of liquid and dehydrated drilling fluid on wellbore cement in multiple scale to compare and quantify the impact of the drilling fluids on the cement plug. In the experiment, specific amount of drilling fluid was mixed with wellbore cement. Different level of contamination was introduced for each phase of the drilling fluid. Class H Portland cement slurries were then prepared using API-10 B standard for a density of 16.4 lb/gal (SG=1.97), and the control sample with 0% contamination is referred to as neat Class H cement slurry. The first part of the testing is to quantify the effect of the contamination on core scale. Samples were tested for petrophysical and mechanical properties in terms of porosity, permeability and unconfined compressive strength. Moreover, Microstructural properties and hydration process were evaluated using Optical Microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) on micrometer scale in order to investigate the fundamental mechanism of contamination on properties of cement matrix. The results showed that the presence of mud would highly harm the performance of the cement. Micro-fractures appeared at the interface of the cement/mud through the Optical Microscope. The porosity of the core increased from 30% porosity of the neat cement to approximately 40% porosity of contaminated samples at most. The compressive strength could drop to more than 50% of the original value. Micro-annular channel and irregularities in the structure can be observed which might explain the increased porosity and permeability. The results presented in this paper would lead to safe implementation of cementing, enable safe Oil and Gas exploration in deepwater without risks of environmental contamination, and contribute to improvement in overall wellbore construction and development of robust hydraulic barrier materials.

Physics of two-phase flows in heterogeneous rocks plays an important role in many applications such as oil and gas migration and geological sequestration of carbon dioxide. Although current pore-scale models are used to compute macroscopic properties required in reservoir simulators, most work is limited to small sample size and homogeneous rocks. There is a need for pore-scale modeling approaches that can accurately represent the 3D complex pore structure and heterogeneity of real media. Pore network modeling simplifies the geometry and flow equations at pore-scale, but can provide characteristic curves in capillary-dominated systems on fairly large samples with huge saving on computational costs compare to direct numerical simulation methods. However, there are limitations for attaining a large representative pore network for heterogeneous cores, namely the technical limits on sample size to discern void space and computational limits on network extraction algorithms. To address these issues, we propose a novel stochastic pore network stitching method in combination with network generation to provide large-enough representative pore network for a core. Our approach proposes to use micro-CT images of various reservoir rock cores in different resolutions to characterize the pore structure. Few signature parts of the core are selected and their corresponding void space and equivalent pore network are extracted. The space between pore networks is filled by using a stochastic network generator that utilizes statistics of all signature networks and a layered stitching method that glues networks based on their average properties. The output is a large network that can be used in any pore network solver. We are focusing on flow properties via quasi-static pore network modeling solver to obtain absolute permeability, relative permeability, and capillary pressure curves. Since the method is stochastic, the workflow should be run on many realizations and final results yield both average and variability of the derived properties. We have tested the developed method on various generated and extracted networks, and we have extended the stitching method to 3D heterogeneous samples.

Water table depth (WTD) is the predominant biophysical control over the occurrence of peat and forest fires in tropical peatlands. In Indonesia, prolonged droughts caused by El-Niño and/or positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), exacerbated by extensive peat drainage for agriculture and plantation establishment, can promote severe peatland fires by lowering WTD and hence desiccating surface and sub-surface peats. The severe drought episode of late 2015 across Indonesia, caused by a strong El Nino and a positive IOD, led to a major and damaging increase in peatland fires, highlighting an urgent need to develop operational systems to forecast potentially severe fire events to mitigate the impacts of fire and haze. The 2002 ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, signed and ratified by a total of 10 ASEAN states, including Indonesia, identifies a critical need for such systems based on near-time climate projections. However, such systems have not yet been developed. While an operational early warning system for forecasting dangerous burning conditions in Indonesia is currently within reach using state-of-the-art modelling tools, such as the ECMWF’s System 5 seasonal forecast model (SEAS5), development is still hampered by insufficient knowledge about the influence of fluctuations in peat moisture on fire, particularly during periods of extreme drought. The main objectives of this study were: i) to deploy a process-based ecosystem model “ecosys” to study how WTD and peat moisture profiles change in tropical peatlands across Riau province, Sumatra, in response to drought and land cover change, focusing on the 2015 drought; and ii) to examine whether those changes could have been predicted using SEAS5. Model spin-up from 2008-2014 was driven by inputs from ECMWF’s climate reanalysis data (ERA5), followed by 3 parallel simulations for 2015, driven by ERA5, ERA5 climatology, and SEAS5 hindcasts. Model outputs of peat moisture profiles and WTD showed how peat moisture and WTD were significantly affected by weather and land uses during the dry season of 2015 which were corroborated well against data from Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite and site-level monitoring networks. Our work is a pioneering attempt to perform large-scale process-based modelling to predict seasonal variations in tropical peatland WTD.

Research data are a vital component of the scientific record. Discovering and assessing data for possible reuse in future research is challenging. The Belmont Forum has recently awarded funds to three international teams as part of a four-year Collaborative Research Action (CRA) on Science-driven e-Infrastructure Innovation (SEI) for the Enhancement of Transnational, Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Data Use to improve data management practices that will increase data reuse. One of these awardees, PARSEC, comprises two interwoven strands, one focused on improving data practices for reuse and credit, and one for synthesis science. The data specialists work alongside synthesis science researchers as they determine the influence of natural protected areas on socioeconomic outcomes for local communities. They collaborate with the researchers to better understand their motivations and work practices, and to aid them in the data-related steps that need to be taken during the research lifecycle. This will ensure their data and code are FAIR-compliant and thus enhance the likelihood of their data being reused and their analyses reproducible. The PARSEC team is working with Research Data Alliance (RDA), Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), DataCite and ORCID to build awareness of the elements required for data creators to receive credit and automated attribution for their data contributions, and the tools that will make it easier to observe usage. Credit for data is an important incentive for researchers to make their data reusable. When data are FAIR and cited, their related publications have higher visibility. We shall discuss various ways in which we are working across the science-data interface in our multi-country and multi-disciplinary working environment to improve data (and code) reuse through better management and crediting. Make your Data FAIR, Cite your Data, Get Credit, Increase Reuse and reap the rewards!

Data that are FAIR demonstrate specific characteristics including: ease of discovery, ability to access, community acceptable formats allowing interoperability, and information that supports the decision for reuse. The process used to determine data reuse is commonly called “fit for purpose” or “fit for use”. These criteria are defined using relevant factors established by the community for which the data was originally created, and also a “best effort” for criteria needed by other research communities. The FAIR Data Principles support robust documentation of datasets to include the necessary information for reuse. An important part of that documentation, or metadata, is clear documentation of the quality and uncertainty related to the data being considered. When this information is not complete, data has a higher tendency of being used incorrectly leading to inaccurate research, rejected papers, or even retracted papers. The importance of data creators to make their data FAIR – including uncertainty information – directly improves the transparency and integrity of our science today and into the future.

Accelerating demand for energy storage has led to increasing development of brine resources in the “Lithium Triangle”, estimated to hold about 75% of the planet’s Li reserves but persistent and fundamental questions regarding the source and transit time of groundwater have confounded efforts to manage these resources effectively. The basins containing these brines lie within the massive Altiplano-Puna Plateau, home to people whose ancestors have inhabited this land for thousands of years and fragile ecosystems that exist nowhere else on Earth. This region is very dry, bordering Earth’s driest non-polar desert and as such, groundwater is the predominant and, in many areas the only source of water. Fundamental questions about the spatiotemporal dimensions of these groundwater systems have only begun to be addressed. In much of this extreme and remote region, there is a severe lack of quality baseline understanding of the regional hydrological system and connections between surface and groundwater bodies. To address these questions, we utilize an exhaustive set (~2,500 individual analyses) of environmental tracer data (δ18O, δ2H, 3H, 87Sr/86Sr), and dissolved major and minor elements in waters collected from over a dozen field campaigns in the Salar de Atacama and Altiplano of Chile and on the Puna Plateau of Argentina. Our integrated analysis pairs these data with rigorous geochemical modelling and physical hydrological measurements from the field and remote sensing products. 3H data show much of the groundwater currently discharging into these basins is non-modern (>60 yrs. old), stable isotope and geochemical data show strong connectivity but also a marked disconnect between some recharge and discharge areas. We show that “fossil” groundwater, 100-10,000 yrs. or older is widespread and fundamental to the system, sharp disconnects exist between the modern hydrological system, the water bodies it sustains, and those sustained by paleo-recharge water. By defining these connections in spatial detail and within a regional integrated framework, we greatly improve the fundamental mechanistic understanding of this and other groundwater-sustained systems. This will greatly improve the ability of communities, governments and industry to manage of these water resources in a way that is genuinely sustainable.

The National Antarctic Data Center (NADC) is the ICT infrastructure designed to gather, handle, publish and provide access to the large amount of scientific data collected by several projects in the framework of the Italian Antarctic National Research Program (PRNA). Aim of the infrastructure is to provide a single integrated system that allows the final users to easily access and share data wherever they are stored. The architecture is based on a System-of-Systems (SoS) concept: a set of systems (functional nodes) interconnected together with each other by means of mediation and adaptation services running on a central infrastructure (common node). The common node is managed by the five Organizations (CNR, INGV, ENEA, OGS, MNA) that contribute to the NADC and is devoted to a regular harvesting of the metadata. Each functional node consists of an existing metadata and data management system implemented by each Organization. Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) hosts one of those functional nodes and it is managing, among others, data/metadata produced by the permanent geomagnetic and ionospheric observatories installed in Antarctica since 1985. The functional nodes are interconnected and federated together by means of interfaces and standard data/metadata models. This distributed architecture allows to interconnect heterogeneous systems and digital infrastructures in a flexible, scalable and sustainable way. This paper describes the general infrastructure and, as an example of functional node, the contribution of the data management related to the Antarctic Ionospheric and Geomagnetic Observatories managed by INGV at Mario Zucchelli station (74°41′42″S, 164°06′50.4″E) and Concordia base (75°05′59.91″S, 123°19′57.38″E).

The production of specialty crops in the Pacific Northwest is an economically important industry and one that is likely to be heavily impacted by rising temperatures and decreasing snowpack associated with climate change. The purpose of this study was to interview small-scale specialty crop farmers in Oregon's Willamette Valley and Central Coast Range to understand how they are experiencing climate change and what information they are using to make farm-management decisions related to the climate. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven specialty crop farmers on farms in Corvallis, OR or at the Corvallis Farmers' Market. The farmers believe that factors such as high temperatures earlier in the growing season, hotter temperatures, increased weather variability, and decreased precipitation are impacting their farms. The interviewed farmers employ multiple strategies to manage the risk of their work, which include incorporating heterogeneity and flexibility into their management, using irrigation and sheltering infrastructure to control the microclimates for crops, and selecting different crops or crop varieties. When considering the information sources farmers use when making decisions about climate and weather, some farmers use short-term weather forecasts, but none rely on longer-term forecasts. As the farmers in this study are all concerned about climate change, having accessible information for the upcoming season and future climate could be helpful if they believe that long-term forecasts are credible.

Surface tension controls all aspects of fluid flow in porous media. Through measurements of surface tension interaction under multiphase conditions, a relative permeability relationship can be determined. Relative permeability is a numerical description of the interplay between two or more fluids and the porous media they flow through. It is a critical parameter for various tools used to characterized subsurface multiphase flow systems, such as numerical simulation for oil and gas development, carbon sequestration, and groundwater contamination remediation. Therefore, it is critical to get a good statistic distribution of relative permeability in the porous media under study. Empirical relationships for determining relative permeability from capillary pressure are already well established but do not provide the needed flexibility in that is required to match laboratory derive relative permeability relationships. By expanding the existing methods for calculating relative permeability from capillary pressure data it is possible to create both two and three-phase relative permeability relationship. Existing laboratory measured relative permeability data along with mercury intrusion capillary (MICP) data coupled with interfacial tension and contact angle measurements were used to determine the efficacy of this approach to relative permeability curve creation. The relative permeability relationships determined with this method were fit to the existing laboratory data to elucidate common fitting parameters that were then used to create relative permeability relationships from MICP data that does not have an associated laboratory measured relative permeability relationship. The study was undertaken as part of the Southwest Regional Partnership on Carbon Sequestration (SWP) under Award No. DE-FC26-05NT42591.

Four transform faults and three intra-transform segments located at Equatorial Atlantic form the Saint Paul Transform System (SPTS), with a long-offset of 630 km. In the northern transform, the 200 km long and 30 km wide Atoba Ridge is a major topographic feature that reaches the sea level at the St. Peter and St. Paul Archipelago island (SPSPA, 00º 55 ‘0’ ‘N and 29º 20 ”43”W). The islets have an average uplift rate of approximately 1.5 mm/year. The southern and northern flanks of the Atobá Ridge are marked by a series of large thrust faults visible in the bathymetry and clearly imaged through seismics and correspond to an exceptionally serpentinized mantle. We have determined the hypocentral location of 62 minor-moderate earthquakes of SPTS, with magnitudes 1.9 ≥ M ≤ 5.3. The earthquakes occurred in 2013 and were recorded by a seismometer installed in SPSPA and three autonomous hydrophones deployed during the COLMEIA cruise. The HYPOCENTER software and Seismic Analysis Code (SAC) were used for data analysis and hypocenter location. The depth range is from 0.2 to 17.5 km and are concentrated in three different zones: the East Shear Zone (ESZ), the Atobá Ridge Zone (ARZ) and the Central Fracture Zone (CFZ). A seismogenic zone with a deep britle-ductile transition was identified in SPTS, with hypocenters reaching 18 km beneath the seafloor. We observed that this lithospheric structure presents relation with the offset age and controls the maximum hypocentral depths of oceanic transform faults. Besides, the earthquakes indicated the existence of a broad serpentinization depth reaching 18 km beneath the ARZ. This was interpreted as the effect of deep water percolation into the mantle in the SPTS, which caused a fluid-mantelic rocks interaction and allowed the expansion of faults into the mantle. Some hypocenters were located in the central fracture zone (CFZ) segment of SPTS and their depths reached 8.8 km beneath the seafloor. We interpreted this seismicity as reactivation of a weakness zone existent in CFZ due to the transpressive load-induced stress originated in Atobá Ridge.

We present a book entitled “Machine Learning, Statistics, and Data Mining for Heliophysics,” an online and open source book available at helioml.org. This book includes a collection of interactive Jupyter notebooks, written in the programming language Python, that walks the reader through the process of applying machine learning, statistics, and data mining techniques on various kinds of solar and space physics data sets to reproduce published results. We consider this book to be a living document with frequent updates. Please contact us if you’d like to submit a chapter!

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.

The effect of non-uniform solar radiation over opposing hillslopes leads to aspect-controlled vegetation patterns in semi-arid ecosystems. It creates a differentiation in soil properties and vegetation characteristics. In mid- to high-latitudes where available soil moisture is a limiting factor for vegetation growth, slopes with polewardfacing aspect tend to develop denser vegetation cover that provides more erosion protection than on the equatorward-facing hillslopes. The variation in erosion rates across opposing hillslopes causes the topographic asymmetry of hillslopes over long timescales. The magnitude of this asymmetry is measured by the hillslope asymmetry index (HAI), a metric given as the ratio of the median slope angles of opposite hillslopes. In this study, we present a novel approach to investigate the relationships of HAI with climatological, geomorphic, and ecologic variables at a global scale. Here, we analyzed these relationships using DEM data to compute HAI for 80 different catchments across the world, in which aspect-controlled vegetation has been reported in the literature. We used the CHILD landscape evolution model (LEM), which uses the continuity equation for water, sediment, and biomass, in order to investigate the control of climatological, geomorphic, and ecologic variables on the development of hillslope asymmetry. Preliminary results show that latitude and mean topographic gradient are the two dominant factors affecting hillslope asymmetry due to their vital role in controlling vegetation density through the modulation of incoming solar radiation. These results improve our understanding on how different climatic variables and geographic properties affect the magnitude of hillslope asymmetry and their implications on landform evolution modelling.

The effects of climate on eroding landscapes and the delivery of sediment from these remain poorly understood. The sampling and dating of river terraces provide one way to address this question, because these embed information about the interconnected dynamics of mountain valley widening, river incision, sediment delivery, and their sensitivity to external forcing. We developed a new approach to OSL dose rate correction of gravels to derive the most detailed chronology of river terrace stratigraphy in NW Africa to date. We sampled river terraces 10-20 m above the modern river plain for dating in a 1200 km2 river catchment, the River M’Goun, eroding the High Atlas Mountains hinterland of the continental river Draa. We applied OSL and IRSL dating to determine the age of 23 samples, using Bayesian methods to derive a robust chronology. We show terrace strath planation starts at ~180 ka in the MIS 6 glacial maximum, followed by aggradation from 140 – 57 ka in MIS 5 to MIS 4 which deposited the up to 10 m stratigraphy of fluvial conglomerate (imbricated rounded cobbles). Incision and abandonment of river terraces occur in MIS 3 to 2 during the transition to the last glacial maximum. Our results compared with an Atlantic record of aridity in the Northern Sahara over the last 120 ka show that aggradation and valley widening occur in response to periods of northward penetration of the African summer monsoon into the High Atlas. We note that these signals persist across the different tectonic zones, from the fold and thrust belts into the sedimentary basins. More widely, our data demonstrate how changes in monsoon patterns can cause changes in the erosion of mountains and transport of sediment in arid continental interiors and these form new inputs for numerical landscape evolution models.

Rivers are an important source of freshwater that support societal needs and natural ecosystems, functioning as both collectors for watersheds and distributors along river corridors. Human-made infrastructure (dams, roads, canals) of various kinds have been built on and along rivers to access drinking water, generate energy, mitigate floods, and support industrial and agricultural production. However, due to the long and inconsistent history of constructing and recording these structures, we lack a globally consistent knowledge about where different types of infrastructure are. Here, we used a simple yet consistent method to visually locate and classify different infrastructures that could act as obstructions on rivers that are wider than 30 meters (total length ~2.1 million km globally). Our approach is based on Google Maps’ high resolution satellite images, which for many places have meter-scale resolution. We recently completed global-scale mapping and classifying different obstructions, and are conducting quality checks. In total, we identified ≥ 40,000 unique obstructions, including large dams and smaller weirs, control structures, partial barriers, as well as low-head dams that are often not included in other databases. This Global River Obstruction Dataset, or GROD, once fully validated, will be freely available to the public. We anticipate that it will be of wide interest to hydrological modeling, aquatic ecosystem, geomorphology, and water resource management communities.