No abstract

New allostratigraphic correlations in west-central Alberta show that flooding surfaces in the Sunkay and basal Vimy members of the Blackstone Formation can be traced eastward from Burnt Timber Creek for >500 km to western Saskatchewan, and for 350 km northward into the Dunvegan and Kaskapau formations. At Burnt Timber Creek, a Miliammina manitobensis microfauna in the lowest 1 m of the Sunkay Member indicates equivalence to the Westgate Formation, and an overlying 70 cm conglomerate is correlative with the Fish Scales Formation. Overlying mudstones contain foraminifera of the Verneuilinoides perplexus Zone, indicative of the middle Cenomanian Belle Fourche Formation. The base of the Second White Specks Formation, as currently defined in core in eastern Alberta, equates in outcrop with the lower part of the Sunkay, rather than the base of the Vimy Member as previously thought. The base of the Second White Specks Formation should be placed about 35 m higher in the stratotype core. A bentonite located 9.3 m above the base of the Sunkay Member at Burnt Timber Creek lies near the highest occurrence of Evolutinella sp. aff. E. apricarius, indicating proximity to the "X" bentonite, recognized across the prairies and traceable north into allomember C of the Dunvegan alloformation. A thick bentonite 93.2 m above the base of the Burnt Timber Creek section lies 4 m above the base of the Vimy Member; this bentonite, traceable from northern British Columbia to New Mexico, lies a few metres below the Cenomanian–Turonian boundary and is here formally named the Bighorn River Bentonite.

No abstract

An air pollution index is a quantitative tool through which air pollution data can be reported uniformly. There have been efforts to describe overall air pollution by an aggregation of pollutant subindices. When ambiguous, these aggregations raise unnecessary alarm by declaring a less polluted air to be highly polluted. Similarly, when eclipsed, a false sense of security is provided by indicating highly polluted air as less polluted. Linear sum and root sum square forms in vogue suffer from ambiguity. Whereas the maximum operator aggregation does not consider change in the remaining pollutants, it is not a good tool for management purposes. In this paper, an ambiguity-and eclipsicity-free function has been presented for aggregation of air pollution subindices. For computer adaptation of the aggregation process, the subindices have been expressed as full range functions of the pollutant concentrations.

No abstract

Rocks of the mid-Cretaceous Colorado allogroup and time-equivalent strata (late middle Albian to early Campanian; $104 Ma to $83 Ma), are dominated by marine mudstone and siltstone that was deposited in a few tens of meters of water up to several hundred kilometers from shore. In the north and west, nearshore and coastal plain facies form relatively minor components of the allogroup. The rocks are divided into allomembers by marine transgressive and flooding surfaces. Allomembers are the fundamental genetic stratal packages, and typically span $50-200 kyr. Allomembers are grouped into larger informal "units" (spanning $400-800 kyr), and alloformations (spanning a few Myr). Except for the Cenomanian Dunvegan alloformation, rocks of the Colorado allogroup lack well-developed clinoform stratification. The scarcity of clinoforms suggests that supply rate usually exceeded accommodation rate and areas of subsidence were immediately filled with sediment up to a subaqueous "accommodation envelope" defined by effective wave base. Alloformations form prismatic wedges, hundreds of kilometers in dip and strike extent and 100-900 m thick. Their component "units" have more arcuate depocenters typically 100-300 km in strike length, suggestive of more localized loading. Lateral shifts of depocenters and rotation of isopachs between units suggest that the loci of subsidence, loading, and of inferred active thrust advance, shifted laterally over distances of $100-300 km in (1 my. Allomembers, occupying even more localized depocenters of 100-200 km strike length, may shift along strike by as much as 300 km on the timescale of a single marine flooding surface (i.e., < $10 kyr), suggesting that the emplacement of loads was spatially and temporally very non-uniform.Successive allomembers commonly change upward from wedge-to sheet-shaped rock bodies. Wedges indicate high accommodation and aggradation rates that confined nearshore sandstone and conglomerate to a belt close to the orogenic margin. In contrast, sheets commonly contain highly progradational nearshore sandstone and represent periods of low accommodation rate that favored shallow water and rapid regression.Two principal depocenters are recognized in the Colorado allogroup. A N-S trending depocenter in northern Alberta and British Columbia accommodated Albian to middle Cenomanian rocks; much of this time is represented by unconformities in the south. In the south, a NW-SE trending depocenter was initiated in the late Cenomanian at $95 Ma and accommodated late Cenomanian to early Campanian (and younger) rocks; in the northern depocenter, late Cenomanian to late Coniacian time is represented by an unconformity. The switch between the northern and southern depocenters apparently Tectonics of Sedimentary Basins: Recent Advances, First Edition. Edited 480 took place very abruptly at $95 Ma. We speculate that subsidence of the northern depocenter was related to the collision and clockwise rotation of the Stikine and Yukon-Tanana terranes during their impingement upon the adjoining ...

No abstract

This study proposes a multi-wavelet Bayesian ensemble of two Land Surface Models (LSMs) using in-situ observations for accurate estimation of soil moisture for Contiguous United States (CONUS). In the absence of a continuous, accurate in-situ soil moisture dataset at high spatial resolution, an ensemble of Noah and Mosaic LSMs is derived by performing a Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) of several wavelet-based multi-resolution regression models (WR) of the simulated soil moisture from the LSMs and in-situ volumetric soil moisture dataset obtained from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) field stations. This provides a proxy to the in-situ soil moisture dataset at 1/8 th degree spatial resolution called Hybrid Soil Moisture (HSM) for three soil layers (1-10 cm, 10-40 cm and 40-100 cm) for the CONUS. The derived HSM is used further to study the layer-wise response of soil moisture to drought, highlighting the necessity of the ensemble approach and soil profile perspective for drought analysis. A correlation analysis between HSM, the long-term (PDSI, PHDI, SPI-9, SPI-12 and SPI-24) and the short-term (Palmer Z index, SPI-1 and SPI-6) drought indices is carried out for the nine climate regions of the U.S. indicating a higher sensitivity of soil moisture to drought conditions for the Southern U.S. Furthermore, a layerwise soil moisture percentile approach is proposed and applied for drought reconstruction in CONUS with a focus on the Southern U.S. for the year 2011.