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1.
Water resources in agriculture-dominated basins of the arid western United States are stressed due to long-term impacts from pumping. A review of 88 regional groundwater-flow modeling applications from seven intensively irrigated western states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas) was conducted to provide hydrogeologists, modelers, water managers, and decision makers insight about past modeling studies that will aid future model development. Groundwater models were classified into three types: resource evaluation models (39 %), which quantify water budgets and act as preliminary models intended to be updated later, or constitute re-calibrations of older models; management/planning models (55 %), used to explore and identify management plans based on the response of the groundwater system to water-development or climate scenarios, sometimes under water-use constraints; and water rights models (7 %), used to make water administration decisions based on model output and to quantify water shortages incurred by water users or climate changes. Results for 27 model characteristics are summarized by state and model type, and important comparisons and contrasts are highlighted. Consideration of modeling uncertainty and the management focus toward sustainability, adaptive management and resilience are discussed, and future modeling recommendations, in light of the reviewed models and other published works, are presented.  相似文献   

2.
Winter wheat yields over a large area of the United States Great Plains are described as functions of the monthly surface atmospheric pressure pattern over North America. Seventy-eight years of pressure data were spatially decomposed with principal components analysis, and linear combinations of the resulting eigenvectors were used to fit a time series of five sensible climatic variables that are generally considered to be important to wheat yields. This surrogate data set was then used to fit the yield time series. The yield data were initially detrended with a simple linear estimator and adjusted with base constants specific for each crop reporting district.Interannual variation in the pressure field explains approximately 40% of the remaining variance in the yield data over the states of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas. When a reduced model was tested on five years of data simultaneously withheld, a similar amount of the variance was explained. Twentyone eigenvectors are consistently associated with the twelve sensible climatic parameters to which yields are most sensitive. Of these, five were found to be significantly changing (at between the 95 and 99% levels), in either linear or quadratic fashion, over the length of the pressure record. It is concluded that long-term change can and does take place in features of the general circulation that are important determinants of large area crop yields.  相似文献   

3.
Subsidence from sinkhole collapse is a common occurrence in areas underlain by water-soluble rocks such as carbonate and evaporite rocks, typical of karst terrain. Almost all 50 States within the United States (excluding Delaware and Rhode Island) have karst areas, with sinkhole damage highest in Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. A conservative estimate of losses to all types of ground subsidence was $125 million per year in 1997. This estimate may now be low, as review of cost reports from the last 15 years indicates that the cost of karst collapses in the United States averages more than $300 million per year. Knowing when a catastrophic event will occur is not possible; however, understanding where such occurrences are likely is possible. The US Geological Survey has developed and maintains national-scale maps of karst areas and areas prone to sinkhole formation. Several States provide additional resources for their citizens; Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania maintain databases of sinkholes or karst features, with Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio providing sinkhole reporting mechanisms for the public.  相似文献   

4.
High winds are one of the nation’s leading damage-producing storm conditions. They do not include winds from tornadoes, winter storms, nor hurricanes, but are strong winds generated by deep low pressure centers, by thunderstorms, or by air flow over mountain ranges. The annual average property and crop losses in the United States from windstorms are $379 million and windstorms during 1959–1997 caused an average of 11 deaths each year. Windstorms range in size from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands square kilometers, being largest in the western United States where 40% of all storms exceed 135,000 km2. In the eastern United States, windstorms occur at a given location, on average, 1.4 times a year, whereas in the western US point averages are 1.9. Midwestern states average between 15 and 20 wind storms annually; states in the east average between 10 and 25 storms per year; and West Coast states average 27–30 storms annually. Storms causing insured property losses >$379 million and windstorms during 1959–1997 caused an average of 11 deaths each year. Windstorms range in size from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands square kilometers, being largest in the western United States where 40% of all storms exceed 135,000 km2. In the eastern United States, windstorms occur at a given location, on average, 1.4 times a year, whereas in the western US point averages are 1.9. Midwestern states average between 15 and 20 wind storms annually; states in the east average between 10 and 25 storms per year; and West Coast states average 27–30 storms annually. Storms causing insured property losses >1 million, labeled catastrophes, during 1952–2006 totaled 176, an annual average of 3.2. Catastrophic windstorm losses were highest in the West and Northwest climate regions, the only form of severe weather in the United States with maximum losses on the West Coast. Most western storms occurred in the winter, a result of Pacific lows, and California has had 31 windstorm catastrophes, more than any other state. The national temporal distribution of catastrophic windstorms during 1952–2006 has a flat trend, but their losses display a distinct upward trend with time, peaking during 1996–2006.  相似文献   

5.
Depth-dependent water-quality and borehole flow data were used to determine where and how contamination enters public-supply wells (PSWs) at study sites in different principal aquifers of the United States. At each of three study sites, depth-dependent samples and wellbore flow data were collected from multiple depths in selected PSWs under pumping conditions. The chemistry of these depth-dependent samples, along with samples of the surface discharge from the PSWs, was compared to that of adjacent nested monitoring wells. The results of depth-dependent analyses from sites in Modesto (California), York (Nebraska), and Tampa (Florida) are summarized and compared. Although the exact mechanisms for transport of contaminants to the PSWs varied among these hydrogeologic settings, in all three settings the presence of wells or boreholes or natural preferential flow paths allowed water and contaminants to bypass substantial portions of the aquifer and to reach PSWs or depths in the aquifer more quickly than would have occurred in the absence of these short-circuiting flow paths. The chemistry and flow data from multiple depths was essential to developing an understanding of the dominant flow paths of contaminants to PSW in all three settings. This knowledge contributes to developing effective strategies for monitoring and protection.  相似文献   

6.
Risk assessment of Tunguska-type airbursts   总被引:1,自引:1,他引:0  
The Tunguska airburst, which devastated a taiga forest over an area greater than 2,000 km2 in a remote region of Central Siberia in 1908, is a classic example of extraterrestrial encounter discussed in the asteroid/comet impact hazard and risk assessment literature (e.g. Longo 2007; Carusi et al. 2007). Although it is generally agreed that the cosmic body caused damage by bursting in the air rather than through direct impact on the Earth’s surface, the Tunguska event is often referred to as an impact event. To the best of our knowledge, no detailed studies have been performed to quantify the risk of a similar-sized event over a populated region. We propose here a straightforward probabilistic risk model for Tunguska-type events over the continental United States and use established risk metrics to determine the property (buildings and contents) and human losses. We find an annual average property loss of ~USD 200,000/year, a rate of ~0.3 fatalities/year and ~1.0 injuries/year ranging from a factor 3 below and to a factor 3 above the indicated values when a reasonable rate uncertainty for Tunguska-type events is taken into account. We then illustrate the case of an extreme event over the New York metropolitan area. While we estimate that this “nightmare” scenario would lead to ~USD 1.5 trillion of property loss, ~3.9 millions of fatalities and ~4.7 millions of injuries, such event is almost impossible (occurrence once every ~30 million years) and should only be considered as an illustrative example.  相似文献   

7.
Land subsidence caused by man-induced depressuring of underground reservoirs has occurred in at least nine urban areas in the United States. Significant efforts to control it have been made in three areas: Long Beach, California; Houston-Galveston, Texas; and Santa Clara Valley, California. In these areas coastal flooding and its control cost more than $300 million. Institutional changes were required in each area to ameliorate its subsidence problem.

In Long Beach and Houston-Galveston, efforts were made to mitigate subsidence only after significant flood damage had occurred. To arrest subsidence at Long Beach, the city lobbied for a special state law, the California Subsidence Act, that required unitization and repressuring of the Wilmington oil field. In the Houston-Galveston region, the Texas State Legislature authorized formation of the Harris-Galveston Coastal Subsidence District with authority to regulate ground-water pumping by permit. This solution, which was achieved through efforts of entities affected by subsidence, was the product of a series of compromises necessitated by political fragmentation and disjointed water planning in the region. Amelioration of subsidence in the Santa Clara Valley was a collateral benefit from the effort by water users to curtail ground-water overdraft in the valley. Importation of surface water and a tax on ground-water pumpage reduced ground-water use, thereby allowing the recovery of water level and the arresting of subsidence.  相似文献   


8.
Assessing Vulnerability to Agricultural Drought: A Nebraska Case Study   总被引:14,自引:6,他引:14  
Recent drought events in the United States and the magnitude of drought losses indicate the continuing vulnerability of the country to drought. Until recently, drought management in many states, including Nebraska, has been largely response oriented with little or no attention to mitigation and preparedness. In 1998, Nebraska began to revise its drought plan in order to place more emphasis on mitigation. One of the main aspects of drought mitigation and planning is the assessment of who and what is vulnerable and why. This paper presents a method for spatial, Geographic Information Systems-based assessment of agricultural drought vulnerability in Nebraska. It was hypothesized that the key biophysical and social factors that define agricultural drought vulnerability were climate, soils, land use, and access to irrigation. The framework for derivation of an agricultural drought vulnerability map was created through development of a numerical weighting scheme to evaluate the drought potential of the classes within each factor. The results indicate that the most vulnerable areas to agricultural drought were non-irrigatedcropland and rangeland on sandy soils, located in areas with a very high probability of seasonal crop moisture deficiency. The identification of drought vulnerability is an essential step in addressing the issue of drought vulnerability in the state and can lead to mitigation-oriented drought management.  相似文献   

9.
The small, burrowing, edwardsiid sea anemone Nematostella vectensis is widely distributed in estuaries and bays. Most typically it occurs in pools in marshes though it may occur subtidally as well. We have compiled records of its occurrence in North America from Nova Scotia to Georgia along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, from Florida to Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico and from California to Washington on the Pacific coast. To date we have found no records of its presence in Alabama or Texas, though it is present in all other of the contiguous coastal states of the United States. The species also occurs in England. We have obtained living specimens from many locations and have crossed females from England, Maryland, Georgia, California, Oregon, and Washington with males from Nova Scotia, Maryland, Georgia, and Oregon. These 24 crosses all yielded viable first-generation anemones that in turn produced second-generation animals. We accept this as proof that this widely distributed anemone is a single species. We have obtained living N. vectensis from 11 areas. Of these, only samples from Maine, Maryland, Georgia, and Oregon contained both sexes. The sample from Nova Scotia was all male and our samples from England, New Hampshire, California, and Washington were all female. We hypothesize that the unisexual samples were from clones resulting from asexual reproduction in this species. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A01BY066 00015  相似文献   

10.
Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) are threatened by loss of sagebrush habitat and the spread of West Nile virus throughout much of their range in North America; yet, future impacts of climate change on these potential stressors have not been addressed. Here, we aim to quantify the potential impacts of climate change on the distribution of climatically suitable habitat for sagebrush and on transmission risk for West Nile virus in the eastern portion of the species’ range. We used Maxent to model the current and future climatically suitable habitat for two dominant sagebrush species in the study area, and we used a degree-day model to predict future West Nile virus transmission risk under likely climate-change scenarios. Our models suggest that areas with the highest future suitability for sagebrush habitat will be found in southwestern Wyoming and north-central Montana. The degree-day model suggests that greater sage-grouse in western portions of the study area, which are generally higher in elevation than where West Nile virus currently occurs, will see increasing risk of transmission in the future. We developed a spatially explicit map of suggested management actions based on our predictions that will aid in conservation of the species into the coming decades.  相似文献   

11.
Variations in the composition and mineral assemblages of boronaluminosilciates (serendibite, grandidierite, kornerupine, and tourmaline) were studied in the abyssal and hypabyssal skarns of New York and California, United States, the Taezhnyi deposit of southern Yakutia, and deposits of the Pamirs, and compared to their occurrences around the world. The genesis of the boronaluminosilicates depends on the facies of the replaced skarns and the calcareous-skarn alteration of the primary composition of the host rocks. The substitution between Mg and Fe, as well as between Al, Si, and B, was studied in complex boronaluminosilciates and associated minerals. It was shown that f of serendibite is determined by that in the replaced skarn minerals (pyroxenes, spinel, sapphirine, and grandidierite) and is inherited in the replacing tourmaline and late silicates. Unlike serendibite, kornerupine is a typomorphic mineral of only bimetasomatic skarns of the abyssal facies. Serendibite, grandidierite, kornerupine, and tourmaline crystallized during the postmagmatic stage of the evolution of boron mineralization at skarn deposits of both the abyssal and the hypabyssal facies, at contact with magnesian carbonate sequences and desilicified aluminosilicate rocks.  相似文献   

12.
This paper analyzes how Mexican hometown associations in New York City practice solidarity so that they might best meet the needs of the transnational communities that they serve. Commonly formed by immigrants in the United States, hometown associations are organizations which send money collectively to their home countries, supporting public infrastructure and community projects. Scholars have debated both the merits of remittance programs that channel migrant funds as economic development and the agency of immigrant economies in neoliberal development structures. Through primary data collected from interviews in New York City, I review the frustrations that hometown associations have with one such program: Mexico's programa tres por uno para migrantes. Concurrently, I examine how the same hometown associations engage ethical economic practices of collective remittance sending and community service provision in New York City. Drawing on feminist literature on diverse economies, I argue that the solidarity work of hometown associations disrupts the dominant remittance as development discourse. Migrants are not content to participate in tres por uno and through practicing solidarity they distance themselves from this neoliberal policy.  相似文献   

13.
The various lobes and segments of the southern periphery of the Laurentide ice sheet reached their maximum extension at different times between 21,000 and 14,000 yr ago, but the CLIMAP date of 18,000 yr ago is taken as a reference level to review the distribution of major vegetational formations in central and eastern United States. Tundra was apparently confined to a narrow belt peripheral to the ice margin only in the Minnesota area and from northern Pennsylvania to New England, with extensions down the crest of the Appalachian Highlands at least as far as Maryland. Some areas south of the Great Lakes may later have been marked by treeless vegetation briefly as the ice retreated. The boreal forest to the south in the central United States was dominated by spruce; the jack pine that had prevailed during previous times was apparently eliminated by the time the ice reached its maximum. In the Appalachian Highlands and the Atlantic Coastal Plain, however, jack pine occurred along with spruce, which decreased in importance southward. The southern limit of the boreal forest in the Southeast was perhaps somewhere in southern Georgia and Alabama. Oak and other temperate deciduous trees were minor components of the boreal coniferous forests especially in the southern Appalacchians, but there is no evidence yet in the southeastern states for a relic mixed mesophytic forest 18,000 yr ago similar to the rich modern deciduous forests of the region, except possibly in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The climate in much of the Southeast was apparently dry as well as cool at that time; in Florida oak/pine scrub and prairie-like openings prevailed, and all but the deepest lakes dried up.  相似文献   

14.
The traditional pre-Illinoian glacial stratigraphy in the central United States has been abandoned, which leaves a void in the Pleistocene stratigraphy of Kansas. The Independence Formation is proposed as a tithostratigraphic unit in northeastern Kansas. The Independence Formation consists of all diamictons and stratified sediments interbedded with diamictons. The Independence Formation vanes greatly in thickness and texture, but it always contains erratics derived from the Canadian Shield. At least two glacial advances took place in northeastern Kansas, first by the Minnesota lobe coming from the northeast, and later by the Dakota lobe from the northwest. During the first advance, glacial Lake Atchison was dammed in a now-buried valley. Overflow from this lake cut spillways that form parts of the Blue, Kansas, and Missouri valleys. During the later ice advance, the Kansas valley was blocked, and temporary lakes formed, from which catastrophic flooding took place. The age of the Independence Formation is interpreted as 0.7 to 0.6 million years BP. It is considered equivalent in age and stratigraphic position to type A2 and A3 tills of Nebraska and western Iowa and to the McCredie Formation of northern Missouri. This age range corresponds to oxygen-isotope stages W16.  相似文献   

15.
This paper explores spatial changes to knowledge transfer by Canadian and American corporate networks from 1976 to 1996. Results support facets of a World Cities approach for Canada. Toronto lies at the top of the hierarchy, while Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver fall into a third tier of specialized regional cities. The American knowledge network also possesses facets of the world cities approach. The world city, New York, lies at the top of the hierarchy. Further down, Chicago is a specialized national city, while a number of regional centers have emerged to play a larger role over the twenty-year study period. A third tier of cities has emerged to play the critical role of specialized regional cities. This geographical phenomenon can be explained in terms of industry, headquarters locations, and network maturity. Finance, insurance and real estate, as well as “other manufacturing” are three sectors of the economy that are prominent in the network. In Canada, these sectors have increasingly centralized in Toronto while decentralizing in the United States. Similarly, the headquarters location of American firms is decentralizing from New York and Chicago, while Canadian headquarters continue to be centralized in Toronto. Finally, results indicate that the potential for knowledge transfer depends upon maturity of the system under investigation. The mature US network with a large pool of qualified business individuals is better suited for knowledge transfer at the regional level. The Canadian network is less developed and not appropriate for regional systems of knowledge transfer. The result is a Canadian corporate knowledge threshold that encompasses the entire country while a number of much smaller corporate knowledge thresholds appear across the United States.  相似文献   

16.
A humerus, coracoid, and pedal phalanx of the California Condor, Gymnogyps californianus, were recovered from the Hiscock Site in western New York, in an inorganic stratum containing wood that is 11,000 radiocarbon years old. Associated vertebrates include mastodont, wapiti, and caribou. Pollen and plant macrofossils from the sediments indicate a spruce-jack pine woodland and a local, herb-dominated wetland community. Historic records (all from western North America) and previous late Pleistocene fossils of the California Condor are associated mainly with warm-temperate climates and floras. The New York fossils show that this bird was able to live in a colder climate and in a boreal, coniferous setting at a time when appropriate food (large mammal carrion) was available. The California Condor, which survives only in captivity, has suffered a greater reduction in geographical range than previously suspected. Much of this reduction in range probably occurred ca. 11,000 yr B.P. when the extinction many North American large mammals resulted in severely reduced availability of food for the California Condor and other large scavenging birds.  相似文献   

17.
18.
The Hudson-Raritan Estuary is one of several United States coastal areas where chemical data have suggested a potential for contaminant-related biological effects, and multiyear intensive bioeffects surveys have been conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The severity and spatial patterns in sediment toxicity were determined in an estuary-wide survey during spring 1991 using amphipods, bivalve larvae, and luminescent bacteria as test organisms. Spatial patterns in toxicity corresponded to the distributions of a number of toxic chemicals in the sediments. Areas that exhibited the greatest sediment toxicity included the upper East River, Arthur Kill, Newark Bay, and Sandy Hook Bay. The lower Hudson River adjacent to Manhattan Island, upper New York Harbor, lower New York Harbor off Staten Island, and parts of western Raritan Bay generally showed lower toxicity. Supporting chemical analyses of the sediments, including acid-volatile sulfide and simultaneously-extracted metals, suggested that metals were generally not the cause of the observed toxicity, with the possible exception of mercury. Among all contaminants analyzed, toxicity was most strongly associated with polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, which were substantially more concentrated in toxic samples than in nontoxic samples, and which frequently exceeded sediment quality criteria.  相似文献   

19.
Geo-referenced data often are collected in small, administrative units such as census enumeration districts or postal code areas. Such areas vary in geographic area and population size and may change over time. In research into drug-related health issues within the United States, U.S. Postal Service ZIP codes represent a commonly used unit for data collection, storage, and spatial analysis because of their widespread availability in health databases through patient contact and billing information. However, the ZIP code was developed for the specific purpose of delivering mail and may be changed at any time, and its design and development does not take into consideration problems that may arise in data collection, analysis, and presentation in health studies. In this paper, we propose a spatial hierarchical modeling approach to quantify trends within ZIP-code based counts when some fraction of ZIP codes change over the study period, that is, when the data are spatially misaligned across time. We propose a data vector approach and adjust the spatial auto-correlation structure within our Bayesian hierarchical model to provide inference for our misaligned data. We motivate and illustrate our approach to explore spatio-temporal patterns of amphetamine abuse and/or dependence in Tracy, California over the years 1995–2005. Uncertainty associated with misaligned data is modeled, quantified, and visualized. The approach offers a framework for further investigation into other risk factors in order to more fully understand the dynamics of illicit drug abuse or dependence across time and space in imperfectly measured data.  相似文献   

20.
This paper examines the effect of distance on acquisition patterns for every fifth year for the period 1955–1980. The fifteen most active merger states are shown to have a relatively constant set of interstate merger relationships once the economic cycle is removed. Finally, the effect of mergers on external control levels for the United States is provided.  相似文献   

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