Search results for "GEOLOGY"
showing 10 items of 6012 documents
Human activity and damaging landslides and floods on Madeira Island
2011
Abstract. Over the last few decades, the island of Madeira has become an important offshore tourism and business center, with rapid economic and demographic development that has caused changes to the landscape due to human activity. In Madeira's recent history, there has been an increase over time in the frequency of occurrence of damaging landslide and flood events. As a result, the costs of restoration work due to damage caused by landslide and flood events have become a larger and larger component of Madeira's annual budget. Landslides and floods in Madeira deserve particular attention because they represent the most serious hazard to human life, to property, and to the natural environme…
Sequential and joint hydrogeophysical inversion using a field-scale groundwater model with ERT and TDEM data
2013
Abstract. Increasingly, ground-based and airborne geophysical datasets are used to inform groundwater models. Recent research focuses on establishing coupling relationships between geophysical and groundwater parameters. To fully exploit such information, this paper presents and compares a joint hydrogeophysical inversion (JHI) approach and sequential hydrogeophysical inversion (SHI) approach to inform a field-scale groundwater model with Time Domain Electromagnetic (TDEM) and Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) data. The implemented SHI coupled inverted geophysical models with groundwater parameters, where the strength of the coupling was based on geophysical parameter resolution. To t…
Sensitivity of a mesoscale model to different convective parameterization schemes in a heavy rain event
2011
Abstract. The Valencia region, on the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, is propitious to heavy precipitation, especially the area encompassing the South of Valencia province and the North of the Alicante province. In October 2007 a torrential rain affected the aforementioned area, producing accumulated rainfall values greater than 400 mm in less than 24 h and flash-floods that caused extensive economic losses and human casualties. This rain event has been studied in numerical experiments using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System. The present paper deals with the effect of using the different convective parameterizations (CP) currently implemented in the Regional Atmospheric…
Numerical study of the October 2007 flash flood in the Valencia region (Eastern Spain): the role of orography
2010
Abstract. A torrential rain event took place in the Valencia region in October 2007, mainly affecting coastal areas and nearby mountains in the center-south of the region, in northern Alicante province. More than 400 mm in 24 h were recorded at some stations in these areas, with lower accumulations in the rest of the region where rainfall was less intense. In the first part of this work a description of the meteorological situation is given. The synoptic frame of the event is characterised by an advection of easterly maritime winds across the Western Mediterranean, lasting for at least 48 h, driving moist air towards the Iberian Peninsula eastern coast and the presence of an upper level iso…
Parametric uncertainty or hydrological changes?
2014
Abstract. The model calibration is the way of hydrologists for searching also a physical interpretation of complex interactions acting within a basin. Actually, it can be frequently noticed how model calibration performed on a given time-window may converge to a point in the parameter space that could be distant from another obtainable calibration of the model in the same basin but considering a different time window. Is that again parametric uncertainty or does the trajectory in the parametric space relate about to a slow hydrological basin change? This paper depicts a possible path for detecting changes' signatures in a streamflow time series. In particular, the paper seeks to draw a way …
Predicting storm-triggered debris flow events: application to the 2009 Ionian Peloritan disaster (Sicily, Italy)
2015
Abstract. The main assumption on which landslide susceptibility assessment by means of stochastic modelling lies is that the past is the key to the future. As a consequence, a stochastic model able to classify past known landslide events should be able to predict a future unknown scenario as well. However, storm-triggered multiple debris flow events in the Mediterranean region could pose some limits on the operative validity of such an expectation, as they are typically resultant of a randomness in time recurrence and magnitude and a great spatial variability, even at the scale of small catchments. This is the case for the 2007 and 2009 storm events, which recently hit north-eastern Sicily …
Discharge estimation combining flow routing and occasional measurements of velocity
2011
A new procedure is proposed for estimating river discharge hydrographs during flood events, using only water level data at a single gauged site, as well as 1-D shallow water modelling and occasional maximum surface flow velocity measurements. One-dimensional diffusive hydraulic model is used for routing the recorded stage hydrograph in the channel reach considering zero-diffusion downstream boundary condition. Based on synthetic tests concerning a broad prismatic channel, the “suitable” reach length is chosen in order to minimize the effect of the approximated downstream boundary condition on the estimation of the upstream discharge hydrograph. The Manning’s roughness coefficient is calibra…
Hot water injection in relation to 1982-84 microseismic events at Campi Flegrei Caldera by thermo-hydro-mechanical simulation
2020
The repeated deformations and seismic unrests at Campi Flegrei caldera (southern Italy) have been identified due to a fluid injection source in volcano active area. We investigated the role of hot water injection in the seismic unrests of 1982-1984 with a view to gaining insights into the caldera’s dynamics, by applying coupled TOUGHREACT-FLAC3D simulator to our computational domain of 10 × 1 × 3 km with a single-phase steam isothermal (HM) and non-isothermal (THM) simulations comparison. The results indicated that the overlying caprock blocks the uprising hot water injection, leading to the building up of pore pressure and shear stress underneath over time. This process substantially modif…
Numerical investigation on water exchange of shale samples
2020
Interest in the hydraulic and mechanical characterization of shales has grown in recent years, because of their application in the context of energy geotechnics. In the frame of nuclear waste disposal shales are considered as host formations for the placements of nuclear waste at high depths. In the frame of hydrocarbon production they are considered as unconventional reservoirs, from which extracting natural gas. Understanding how fluids flow through shales is then a key aspect for both fields of application. This paper focuses on the analysis of the transport of water vapour through laboratory samples. After reviewing the balance and flow laws that govern the transport of fluid in unsatur…
Estimation of synthetic flood design hydrographs using a distributed rainfall–runoff model coupled with a copula-based single storm rainfall generator
2014
Abstract. In this paper a procedure to derive synthetic flood design hydrographs (SFDH) using a bivariate representation of rainfall forcing (rainfall duration and intensity) via copulas, which describes and models the correlation between two variables independently of the marginal laws involved, coupled with a distributed rainfall–runoff model, is presented. Rainfall–runoff modelling (R–R modelling) for estimating the hydrological response at the outlet of a catchment was performed by using a conceptual fully distributed procedure based on the Soil Conservation Service – Curve Number method as an excess rainfall model and on a distributed unit hydrograph with climatic dependencies for the …