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ground- water, geo- statistics, environmental- engineering, earth- science

Archive for 2014

AGU presentation

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Next week is AGU week!

I will be taking part again this year. If you want to see me, my poster presentation is a good opportunity:

date Wednesday, 17 December 2014
time 01:40 PM – 06:00 PM noon
location Moscone West, Poster Hall
ID: H33E-0866
title of talk “Incorporating Locally Averaged Distributions Based on Categorical Land-Use Information into Point Estimation”
session Multiscale Interactions and Structures in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Systems: Monitoring, Modeling, and Data Assimilation Posters
authors Claus Haslauer, Theresia Heißerer, András Bárdossy

You can find my ePoster also online. Feel free to contact me, if you can’t make it on wednesday afternoon. I’ll also be trying to be active on twitter. Looking forward to see you all! 😉

Written by Claus

December 12th, 2014 at 6:43 pm

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Spatial Copula Workshop

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A couple of weeks ago, I spent two days in Münster, at the Institute for Geoinformatics, and attented the Spatial Copula Workshop organized by Benedikt Gräler from the University of Münster and Claudia Czado, from the Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the Technical University of Munich.

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Participants of the Copula workshop at the University of Münster.

The nice thing was to present to a room full of people, and everybody at least had a basic understanding and appreciation of what copulas are. This was a most welcome change! Thanks Benedikt for organizing and hosting this wonderful workshop!

Written by Claus

October 17th, 2014 at 3:23 pm

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Geology of the Lechtal

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Outcrop at the Gorge of the Bernhardsbach, Ebigenalb, Lechtal, Austria
Outcrop at the Gorge of the Bernhardsbach, Ebigenalb, Lechtal, Austria

These wonderfully folded geological layers can be found directly behind the open-air theatre where “Geierwally” is played in Ebigenalb, Austria (Lechtal). Behind that theatre, the creek “Bernhardsbach” forms a george for few hundred meters, and offers this spectacular view on an outcrop. This outcrop is one of the best windows into the history of the Alps.

Field Trip

Peter Nasemann guided us this summer to glance through some of such windows on a walking tour organized by the OEAV Lechtal. Peter Nasemann has written a book on the geology of the “Lechtal” and is considered an expert on the geology of the Alps. During the walk we stopped at three spots (see map).

Map locations
Locations of site-visits during the geological field trip

1) Gravel Bed next to Klimm Brücke, Elmen

At the first stop, Peter Nasemann introduced us to local rocks and their relation into the geologic sequence (main types are set in bold, youngest one are listed on top):

  • (Aptychenkalke)
  • Radiolarit (Elmer Mutterkopf, Mittagspitze) youngest that we looked at (Jurassic), red-ish, not prone to erosion
  • three similar types:
    • Allgäu Schichten: old, middle, and young (in the sequence right after Radiolarit), all still Jurassic),
    • Lechtaler Schichten: not entirely sure about this layer anymore.
    • Kössener Schichten (Triassic; The Stablalm is located on Kössener Schichten but everywhere around in its vicinity Radiolarit can be found, which consists of black / dark clay of light grey colour, sometimes yellow chalks with many fossils. Sometimes the annual cycles of the organic material are visible. At the bottom of each layer, remnants of animals can be found that sank into the deposits. Stones of the Kössener Schichten are somewhat “mudstones”… if you place them in your garden and wait for a couple of years, they will expand due to the water added over time, and the remnants can serve as a good addition to the soil in your garden.
  • Hauptdolomit (Triassic, Klimmspitze): prone to erosion, not nice for climbing; some sections of the Hauptdolomit, predominantly dark ones (“Seefelder Schichten”) are considered building material for mineral oil, and can make blotting paper oily; these are also used for Steinöl
  • (Raibler Schichten)

Theoretically, the mesozoic sequence of the East-Alpine of the Central Alps has been summarized by Adrian Pfiffner in his book “Geologie der Alpen” (figure below).

Mesozoische Schichtreihe Ostalpins small
The mesozoic sequence of the East-Alpine of the Central Alps has been summarized by Adrian Pfiffner.

Generally, the Lechtal can be divided into dominantly Hauptdolomit in the lower valley and dominantly not-Hauptdolomit (the three similar types) in the upper valley. The divide is located near Häselgehr (Otterbach). Traditionally, the upper valley has a richer agriculture, the lower valley richer forrestry (Hauptdolomit sustains trees, but not agriculture). In fact, the richness of the diocese of Augsburg partly originated in its forests around Füssen and in the lower Lechtal (there is still a Flurbezeichnung “Füssener Wald” in the Lechtal)

The Walser were experts on agriculture, and they found the patches where the “Abtychen-Schichten” (and “Kössener Schichten”) appeared on ground surface. In the case of the Lechtal, these areas are generally higher up in the mountains. Coincidentally, the Walser came over the saddles or ridges of the mountains, not via the valleys (which one would normally think of being the connecting features).

Since we were standing on the banks of the river lech, we had a closer look on the gravel bed. It served as an excellent example for how a river builds its bed, and how the river bed gets stronger after a high flow event. Behind each stone in the river bed, sediment gets accummulated. This can form solid patches, depending on the flow rate and hence stone size at a given location.

Rocks Bottom Lech
Rocks at the bottom of the river Lech. When wet, flow direction from right to left. The deposits “behind” the larger rock are visible next to the black part of the photo bag.

2) First Bend on the Road to Bschlabs

After having been introduced to the rocks occurring in the area, based on samples from the river bed, and to the sequence of their occurrence in the geological sequence, we drove up to higher ground along the road to Bschlabs, to get an overview over the area.

Sometimes, the sequence of the rocks is not occurring according to the order of deposition described above. This can be seen at the Mittagsspitze (on the far right on the picture below), where Radiolarit is not at the top.

Lower Lech Valley
View from spot 2 along the river Lech towards north (downstream, “U-valley”). At the right edge of the valley, younger terraces can be seen.

Another example for an “inverted” sequence of rocks is the Grießtalerspitze, where Hauptdolomit lies above Radiolarit and above Aptychenkalk.

Otto Ampferer was the first to recognize that such “mixed up” sequences can occur when one layer is pushing against other layers. This phenomenon is called Überschiebung / overthrusting. This is also why the picture of the outcrop at the top of this post, is so important.

3) Gorge of the Bernhardsbach behind Geierwally Theatre

The last spot was the Gorge of the Bernhardsbach (introductory picture), which served Otto Ampferer as a basis to establish the theory of overthrusting in the 1920s (english article with interesting picture of Sölden and bautiful sketches, paper in German).

Further Information

Joachim Kuhlemann has assembled a geologcial trail in the Sulzetal, a side valley of the Lechtal. His homepage also has some further information.

Written by Claus

September 28th, 2014 at 10:47 am

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Spatial Copula Workshop at the University of Münster

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Next week on monday and tuesday, there will be a spatial copula workshop, held by the fine folks at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster. I’m looking forward to discuss copula-related issues with interesting people.

Here is some more information regarding my talk:

date: Monday, September 22nd
time: 10:00 am
location: Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster
title of talk: “Spatial Interpolation Using Secondary Information and Censored Measurements ”
authors: Claus Haslauer, Theresia Heißerer, András Bárdossy

Written by Claus

September 15th, 2014 at 5:33 pm

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Presentation at GeoEnv X

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On Wednesday I will be giving a presentation in Paris, France. In the building where Georges Matheron worked. The conference “geostatistics for environmental applications” celebrates its 10th repetition.

If you happen to be in or near Paris, let me know — here are some details about my presentation:

 

date: Wednesday, July 9th
time: 12:00 noon
location: L109
title of talk: “Realistic Non-Stationary Spatial Interpolation”
session: Geostatistical Theory & New Methodologies 1
authors: Claus Haslauer, Theresia Heißerer, András Bárdossy

 

We’ll be next door! 

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Photo by victortsu – http://flic.kr/p/ht1wM4

Written by Claus

July 4th, 2014 at 4:28 pm

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Reflections on EGU 2014

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Here are some reflections on EGU 2014 that I started to write down on its final day, but haven’t had time to post until now.

There are only two things that stand out from the talks and the posters (Hazel Gibson collected a few extraordinary posters here).

  • the best scientific talks are the ones that explain one thing well and then show a few results. I find that much more is not possible in 13 minutes. Particularly, I remember E? Foufoula, who had a beautiful slide that explained how she thinks about similarity and dis-similarity in time-series.
  • in the posters I had great fun wondering around all kinds of topics. I found out how wind-turbine engineers try to place turbines optimally in a wind-turbine field. I learned about surface run-off. I had a great chat with Anna Sciani on infiltration processes at a hillslope, and about the worth and work related to the combination and cycling of and between field-experiments and associated modelling.

Besides the talks and the posters, I was particularly impressed by this year’s medal lectures that I attended.

Medal Lectures

Among the three, personally, I was moved and inspired greatly by Upmanu Lall’s talk. Bruno Merz said in his laudatio that he appreciates that Upmanu Lall can think outside the box. I remember that I thought during the laudatio that this seems like a weird thing to say in a laudatio. Now I think this was the best thing to say.

Here is the list of the three medal lectures I attended. Interestingly, Hoshin Gupta and Upmanu Lall are also co-author of recent discussion papers that appeared in Water Resources Research that are also linked. The papers contain at least some aspects of the talks.

Scientific Debates

at the beginning of the conference I was intrigued by the concept of a “scientific debate”. I attended the one on geo-engineering (also because there were no particularly seemingly interesting topics for sessions in the program — a rare occasion). The mindsets of the panelists were not very diverging, hence the debate was fairly calm. Here are my take-home messages:

  • in an ideal world, if we had a crop that has the same nutritous properties, needs less water, is somehow generally better for the environment than existing crops, and leads to more yield, then yes, we would all be for that, and we could call that geo-(bio-)-engineering. And partly, this is happening.
  • win-win situations are rare, and the big question seems to be how to “properly” “treat” the non-winners. Related to that, another big question is at what point in time and under what circumstances would we accept some large scale engineering project, with associated large, partly unknown, and uncertain consequences (“tipping point”)
  • large scale vs. small scale: the discussion was largely focussed on larger-scale engineering works. At the end was some discussion if small scale or bottom-up approaches would not be better. But then, it was not clear how to know which small approach would have large consequences, and how it could be adopted to improve the consequences.
  • the panelists, scientists, seemed more concerned about geo-politics than about geo-engieneering. Everybody agreed, that solutions in harmony between all parts of society, i.e. scientists, engineers, lawyers, economists, social scientists, medical experts need to be found.

Here is a good document by the Royal Society on geoengineering (via Jim McQuaid)

Google

At the google booth I was re-introduced to their GIS-related computing capabilities, called “earthengine“. It seems like anybody can cooperate with them for smart, computing intensive remote sensing type calculations and analysis. On their website they have some pretty impresive videos. This one here is about the growth of irrigation in Saudi Arabia, as evident from an explosion of pivot-irrigated plots.

Written by Claus

June 22nd, 2014 at 4:47 pm

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Heat Stored in the Oceans

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Here is an interesting chart, that I saw yesterday at the IPCC session at EGU.

It shows the energy stored in different compartments. There is more heat stored in water than say in the air, due to the larger heat capacity of water. The exchange of heat, I think, must occur via temperature. So this must have an affect on the oceans, the living beings within the oceans, and on climate.

As Steve Easterbrook points out at azimuth:

The oceans act as a huge storage heater, and will continue to warm up the lower atmosphere (no matter what changes we make to the atmosphere in the future).

IPCC AR5 WG1 Box 3 1 Fig 1

Description of this figure from IPCC

(Box 3.1 Fig 1) Plot of energy accumulation in zettajoules within distinct components of Earth’s climate system relative to 1971 and from 1971–2010 unless otherwise indicated. Ocean warming (heat content change) dominates, with the upper ocean (light blue, above 700 m) contributing more than the deep ocean (dark blue, below 700 m; including below 2000 m estimates starting from 1992). Ice melt (light grey; for glaciers and ice caps, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet estimates starting from 1992, and Arctic sea ice estimate from 1979–2008); continental (land) warming (orange); and atmospheric warming (purple; estimate starting from 1979) make smaller contributions. Uncertainty in the ocean estimate also dominates the total uncertainty (dot-dashed lines about the error from all five components at 90% confidence intervals).

A good discussion about this topic, also related to the uncertainties in the predictions related to stored heat can be found at Climate Etc.

Written by Claus

May 1st, 2014 at 2:49 pm

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Ready for EGU Vienna 2014

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Everything is ready for EGU: the talk is prepared — see you all tomorrow morning!

Here are some details:

date: Monday, April 27th
time: 9 am
location: Rm. B2
title of talk: “Using Secondary Information for Realistic Interpolation of Groundwater Quality Parameters and Associated Uncertainty Quantification”
session: GI1.5 Applications of Data, Methods and Models in Geosciences
authors: Claus Haslauer, Theresia Heißerer, András Bárdossy

I remember from last year, that I enjoyed the spot pictured below for lunch: it’s outside, with a few on water (it might be a side-canal of the Danube, and: there is a physical map of Europe with typical rocks of different parts of Europe glued to their proper location. Hence, I am looking forward to a collection that the EGU has in mind, as they write here:

All participants are welcome to bring a stone from their home country to be collected in the entrance hall, placed in a showcase, and their origin will be marked on a world map. This will be a piece of geoscience art created by all participants together and is part of the 2014 theme Face of the Earth. Please catch up on the regulations in your country regarding the export of such a stone. The stone should not be larger than 12 x 12 x 12 cm. The artwork will be donated to an Austrian educational organization. Therefore, your stone will stay in Vienna. Exhibition Spot: Entrance Hall – Ground Floor (Yellow Level)

Geologie Europa Mosaik small

Written by Claus

April 27th, 2014 at 11:57 am

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Beautiful Latex Equations in OmniOutliner

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The mac has recently had its 30th birthday. I am too young to remember its first birthday, but I am old enough to feel the pain! I’ve never used anything pre OSX. One piece of software (as apps have previously been called) has been with me since the beginnings: omnioutliner. I won’t get into fights of outlining versus mindmapping. I think both have their place, and I also think that mindnode is an awesome software.

Taking notes that contain equations has been and is my bread and butter. When laptops were finally portable enough and affordable enough to be taken into a classroom, this was a joy for me, because I could use then omnioutliner for my notes — back then, a little app called “oo3eq” facilitated the combination of equations and omnioutliner. This is how it worked:

  • type your equation in latex into the note field of omnioutliner
  • hit a button, and a pdf would appear in the row that belongs to the note
  • the equation would still be in the note, which I found very useful for future reference.
  • having a pdf of the equation visible directly above the note, was much more pleasing to the eye, and helped following the notes that I took tremendously.

I did try to reproduce this behaviour, and you can check it out on github. There is an applescript that gets the content of the selected note as a string, which must be a valid latex math expression. This string is passed to a python script that generates a valid latex file, which is processed in the script. The result is a pdf file. Back in applescript, this pdf file is pasted as an attachment into the selected row.

Here is a screenshot how this can look like:

Screenshot of a sample document with equations

I am running this script via a key trigger in quicksilver, as described here. This works well, but is not nearly as nice as the beautiful icons that came with “kinkless gtd“, which later turned into omnifocus.

This is my reasoning for doing it:

  • omnioutliner 4 has been released somewhat co-incidental with the recent mac birthday
  • oo4 continues to have strong applescript support
  • oo3eq is not around anymore; at least I couldn’t find it, and the version I still had around did not work anymore on my current setup
  • the whole thing is reasonably quick, and I learned a few things about applescript and python

Written by Claus

February 12th, 2014 at 12:12 pm

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Fun with Python: Script for Daily Newspaper

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This post has to do neither with water nor with statistics. But because it’s been christmas break, I found some time to do some fun stuff with python:

I wrote a python script that downloads the issue of my choice of a pdf on my iPad. Partcularly, the script

  • lets me chose which issue of the paper (relative to the current day) I want to download
  • checks if that file might already exist on a relevant dropbox folder – checks if that file exists on the newspaper’s server (there is no paper on a holiday, f.ex) – if checks are ok, then the pdf is downloaded locally – saves the pdf in a selected folder within my dropbox – opens Goodreader, downloads the current file from dropbox (the proper url of the file needed to be determined) – deletes the downloaded pdf locally within pythonista

The relevant modules are the dropbox module of pythonista and the requests module to download the pdf with authentication.

The rationale behind attempting this was two fold:

  • using python on my iPad: I have downloaded pythonista a little while ago, but haven’t had time to play with it
  • since it has been possible, I have been subscribing to a German daily newspaper, which can be download as a pdf. I guess they are trying to foster the use of iPaper. I tried that for the last couple of weeks using iBooks on the iPad, and I don’t like it for two reasons:

    1. the iPaper files are larger than the pdfs, hence they take noticeably longer to load.
    2. I found it to be almost impossible to get the iPaper files out of iBooks on the iPad (to some storage place, for example).

The tipping bucket that led me to actually do this was that since a little while it is not possible anymore to download the pdfs directly from within Goodreader

Goodreader came out with an updated version two days ago. This makes the script even more powerful. This update solved issues related to the rendering of pdfs. I am not getting money from Goodreader, but I consider it to be the most useful software I have on my iPad. It particularly integrates awesomely with directories on an OSX Server.

Downloading the pdf

This is surprisingly easy using the requests package, that I just found out that it existed. Basically, downloading a pdf from a known url comes down to one line:

r = requests.get(url, auth=('XXX', 'YYY'))

Saving to Dropbox

This is step is a little bit more involved:

  • Before you start you have to register an ‘app’ in the developer part of dropbox. This will get you an APP_KEY and an APP_SECRET. In the python API you also need a token, which is from what I understand a string consisting of the name of your app in dropbox concatenated with '.token'.
  • When you’ve got that, I found some code on github that deals with the authentication process.
  • Finally, within the python module within pythonista, saving a file comes down to another one liner basically (with some preparations):

    sess = dropbox.session.DropboxSession(APP_KEY, APP_SECRET, ACCESS_TYPE) 
    client = dropbox.client.DropboxClient(sess) 
    f = open(filename) 
    response = client.put_file('/Apps/Pythonista/' + filename, f)
    

Open Issuess

  • the link between pythonista and good reader via dropbox works reasonably well. Would be nice to have a direct link (along the lines of ‘open in’).
  • it’s possible to create little home scree icons that call your code, also with command line arguments. As far as I can tell, you have to fix a certain value of the command line argument to one icon… that seems a bit against the flexibility of command line arguments
  • the time delta doesn’t treat boundaries of months correctly fixed by the first commit
  • not sure if raise Exception is really the way to go if a) the file exists already on dropbox or b) if there doesn’t exist a paper on the desired date

Conclusions

  • Pythonista offers a tool to achieve things that otherwise would be next to impossible on the iPad – at the same time, one has to wonder, why such things are forced to be impossible to begin with – writing code on the iPad without a dedicated external keyboard is… challenging. Despite the good editor of Pythonista.

The script is available on github.

Written by Claus

January 9th, 2014 at 4:23 pm

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