Publications
Filter Total Items: 7240
The SAFRR (Science Application for Risk Reduction) Tsunami Scenario
The Science Application for Risk Reduction (SAFRR) tsunami scenario depicts a hypothetical but plausible tsunami created by an earthquake offshore from the Alaska Peninsula and its impacts on the California coast. The tsunami scenario is a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the California Geological Survey (CGS), the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES
The SAFRR tsunami scenario: improving resilience for California
On March 11, 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and the resulting tsunami devastated Japan with a disaster of unfathomable proportions. Five thousand miles away, the waves from Tohoku caused $50 to 100 million in damages in California. Although this pales in comparison to the loss of lives and property in Japan, the U.S. Government must ask whether California, and the national economy, will someday face
Authors
Stephanie L. Ross, Lucile M. Jones, Kevin H. Miller, Keith A. Porter, Anne Wein, Rick I. Wilson, Bohyun Bahng, Aggeliki Barberopoulou, José C. Borrero, Deborah M. Brosnan, John T. Bwarie, Eric L. Geist, Laurie A. Johnson, Stephen H. Kirby, William R. Knight, Kate Long, Patrick Lynett, Carl E. Mortensen, Dmitry J. Nicolsky, Suzanne C. Perry, Geoffrey S. Plumlee, Charles R. Real, Kenneth Ryan, Elena Suleimani, Hong Kie Thio, Vasily V. Titov, Paul M. Whitmore, Nathan J. Wood
Mobile laser scanning applied to the earth sciences
Lidar (light detection and ranging), a method by which the precise time of flight of emitted pulses of laser energy is measured and converted to distance for reflective targets, has helped scientists make topographic maps of Earth's surface at scales as fine as centimeters. These maps have allowed the discovery and analysis of myriad otherwise unstudied features, such as fault scarps, river channe
Authors
Benjamin A. Brooks, Craig Glennie, Kenneth W. Hudnut, Todd Ericksen, Darren Hauser
Remote detection of magmatic water in Bullialdus crater on the Moon
Once considered dry compared with Earth, laboratory analyses of igneous components of lunar samples have suggested that the Moon’s interior is not entirely anhydrous. Water and hydroxyl have also been detected from orbit on the lunar surface, but these have been attributed to nonindigenous sources, such as interactions with the solar wind. Magmatic lunar volatiles—evidence for water indigenous to
Authors
Rachel L. Klima, John Cahill, Justin Hagerty, David Lawrence
The SAFRR Tsunami Scenario
The U.S. Geological Survey and several partners operate a program called Science Application for Risk Reduction (SAFRR) that produces (among other things) emergency planning scenarios for natural disasters. The scenarios show how science can be used to enhance community resiliency. The SAFRR Tsunami Scenario describes potential impacts of a hypothetical, but realistic, tsunami affecting California
Authors
K. Porter, Lucile M. Jones, Stephanie L. Ross, J. Borrero, J. Bwarie, D. Dykstra, Eric L. Geist, L. Johnson, Stephen H. Kirby, K. Long, P. Lynett, K. Miller, Carl E. Mortensen, S. Perry, G. Plumlee, C. Real, L. Ritchie, C. Scawthorn, H.K. Thio, Anne Wein, P. Whitmore, R. Wilson, Nathan J. Wood
Geomagnetic referencing--the real-time compass for directional drillers
To pinpoint the location and direction of a wellborne, directional driller rely on measurements from accelerometers, magnetometer and gyroscopes. In the past, high-accuracy guidance methods required a halt in drilling to obtain directional measurements. Advances in geomagnetic referencing now allow companies to use real-time data acquired during drilling to accurately potion horizontal wells, decr
Authors
Andrew Buchanan, Carol Finn, Jeffrey J. Love, E. William Worthington, Fraser Lawson, Stefan Maus, Shola Okewunmi, Benny Poedjono
The Anemomilos prediction methodology for Dst
This paper describes new capabilities for operational geomagnetic Disturbance storm time (Dst) index forecasts. We present a data‐driven, deterministic algorithm called Anemomilos for forecasting Dst out to a maximum of 6 days for large, medium, and small storms, depending upon transit time to the Earth. This capability is used for operational satellite management and debris avoidance in Low Earth
Authors
W. K. Tobiska, D. Knipp, W. J. Burke, D. Bouwer, J. Bailey, D. Odstrcil, M. P. Hagan, J. Gannon, B. R. Bowman
Reverberations on the watery element: A significant tsunamigenic historical earthquake offshore the Carolina coast
We investigate an early nineteenth-century earthquake that has
been previously cataloged but not previously investigated in
detail or recognized as a significant event. The earthquake
struck at approximately 4:30 a.m. LT on 8 January 1817 and
was widely felt throughout the southeastern and mid-Atlantic
United States. Around 11:00 a.m. the same day, an eyewitness
described a 12-inch tide that rose
Authors
Susan E. Hough, Jeffrey Munsey, Steven N. Ward
Effects of error covariance structure on estimation of model averaging weights and predictive performance
When conducting model averaging for assessing groundwater conceptual model uncertainty, the averaging weights are often evaluated using model selection criteria such as AIC, AICc, BIC, and KIC (Akaike Information Criterion, Corrected Akaike Information Criterion, Bayesian Information Criterion, and Kashyap Information Criterion, respectively). However, this method often leads to an unrealistic sit
Authors
Dan Lu, Ming Ye, Philip D. Meyer, Gary P. Curtis, Xiaoqing Shi, Xu-Feng Niu, Steve B. Yabusaki
Discussion: Numerical study on the entrainment of bed material into rapid landslides
A paper recently published in this journal (Pirulli & Pastor, 2012) uses numerical modelling to study the important problem of entrainment of bed material by landslides. Unfortunately, some of the basic equations employed in the study are flawed, because they violate the principle of linear momentum conservation. Similar errors exist in some other studies of entrainment, and the errors appear to s
Authors
Richard M. Iverson
The 2011 Mw 7.1 Van (Eastern Turkey) earthquake
We use interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), body wave seismology, satellite imagery, and field observations to constrain the fault parameters of the Mw 7.1 2011 Van (Eastern Turkey) reverse-slip earthquake, in the Turkish-Iranian plateau. Distributed slip models from elastic dislocation modeling of the InSAR surface displacements from ENVISAT and COSMO-SkyMed interferograms indicate u
Authors
John R. Elliot, Alex C. Copley, R. Holley, Katherine M. Scharer, Barry Parsons
Surface electric fields for North America during historical geomagnetic storms
To better understand the impact of geomagnetic disturbances on the electric grid, we recreate surface electric fields from two historical geomagnetic storms—the 1989 “Quebec” storm and the 2003 “Halloween” storms. Using the Spherical Elementary Current Systems method, we interpolate sparsely distributed magnetometer data across North America. We find good agreement between the measured and interpo
Authors
Lisa H. Wei, Nichole Homeier, Jennifer L. Gannon