Streamflow Changes of Small and Large Rivers in the Aldan River Basin, Eastern Siberia

The flow of large northern rivers has increased, but regional patterns of changes are not well understood. The aim of this study is the estimation of monthly discharge changes of the 11 river catchments in the Aldan River basin in Eastern Siberia, the largest Lena River tributary and the sixth largest river in Russia. We considered the trend dependence on month, number of years in the sample, finish and start years, and basin area. The median fraction of samples with no trend, positive and negative trends are 70.5%, 28.5%, and 1%, respectively. Longer samples tend to show more positive trends than shorter ones. There is an increasing fraction of samples with positive trends as a function of later sample end year, whereas the start year does not result in a similar pattern. The larger basins, with one exception, have more positive trends than smaller ones. The trends in monthly streamflow have prominent seasonality with absence of positive trends in June and increasing fraction of samples with positive trends from October till April. The study reports the recent streamflow changes on the rarely analyzed rivers in Eastern Siberia, where air temperature rises faster than in average on the globe. The study results are important for water resources management in the region and better understanding of current environmental changes.

Framing Law Stories: Work Health and Safety and the Self-employed Person’s Wellbeing

The question of whether law can, or cannot, touch the territory of the wellbeing of workers is steadfastly rising to the surface of the contemporary world of work. This begs exploration of whether current law provides ways to workers’ wellbeing. This article explores whether the self-duties that the self-employed person owes herself under sub-sections 19(5) and 28(a) of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011(NSW) (‘WHSA’) touch her wellbeing at work. The WHSA is the state’s adoption of the Model Work Health and Safety Act. In adopting the methodology of legal narratology ( Olson 2014 ), this article unframes grand narratives of law and wellbeing and renders a collection of micro narratives which emerged from the law stories told by seven self-employed persons juxtaposed with the story the WHSA tells of itself. The research has been conducted in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. The article draws upon four law stories which frame the interpretations that: (1) the self-employed person must ensure, and take reasonable care for, his or her own physical and psychological wellbeing and safety, while wellbeing unlimited from that definition lies in law’s lacunae; (2) the self-employed person must ensure the provision of adequate facilities for her wellbeing at work and the maintenance of those facilities, while an intentional by-product of discharging health and safety duties is wellbeing beyond liability; (3) the self-employed person may, or may not, promote wellbeing in discharging her self-duties ( Tooma 2020 ); and (4) a desire for law in the self’s wellbeing appeals to law beyond the WHSA. The article ultimately invites the reader’s own interpretations of the ineffable, sometimes called wellbeing.

Justification of the technological scheme of water treatment plants in the Northern zone of the Tyumen region

A characteristic feature of the qualitative composition of natural water of the Northern zone of the Tyumen region, regardless of the season, are: low salt content – less than 200 mg/dm3 and suspended solids – 2–30 mg/dm3, iron content at 0,1-5,5 mg/dm3, high color – 40–130 ˚ of the platinum-cobalt scale. When eliminating color and complex-bound iron from natural water, the greatest difficulties are associated with low salt content and small values of suspended solids. This predetermines a slightly different from the regulations approach to the choice of technological scheme of water treatment. Based on the results of the research, variants of technological schemes of natural water treatment of the northern rivers are proposed.

Impacts of frozen season and its possible future changes on the hydro- and morphodynamics of northern rivers

<p>Global climate change is driving rapid changes in polar region, and significant attention has been given to predicting changes in precipitation and hydrology. However, warming will also alter sediment dynamics and drive morphological change as the melting of river and ground ice will mobilise floodplain and river channel sediments. The transport of this additional sediment can have a number of direct and indirect impacts on societies and ecosystems with yet unpredictable magnitude. There is a significant knowledge gap concerning how material is transported seasonally across such zones, and how the frozen season at present and its possible future changes affect the hydro- and morphodynamics of these northern rivers.</p><p>Therefore, it is needed <strong>1:</strong> To determine the impacts of varying river ice processes on seasonal hydrodynamics, sediment transport, and flood hazards in the high north;<strong> 2:</strong> To define the seasonal interlinkages and combined effects of sub-aerial (e.g., freeze-thaw, mass movements) and fluvial processes (e.g., ice-covered/open-channel flow) on morphodynamics, sediment transport and its origin in these seasonally ice-covered river systems.<strong> 3:</strong> To upscale reach scale seasonally-driven river morphodynamics to the watershed scale and simulate changes into the future, whilst defining the feedbacks between defrosting watersheds and total sediment load transported to the oceans.</p><p>This work is yet to be done, however, preliminary results are presented based on gathered pilot data and studies. Recent results have revealed that river ice can have the most significant role, greater than that of flowing water, in erosion and transport of coarse sediment from a sub-arctic river channel bed and its gently sloping banks. In addition, the findings from sandy meandering river suggest that certain ice cover conditions cause the vertical and lateral flow distribution to be opposite to the open channel situation. Thus, future changed river ice cover characteristics are expected to change these transport mechanisms and velocity distribution. This emphasizes that future predictions of river ice are needed, before predicting the changes in river morphology. However, it has been recently shown that thermal ice growth equation is not expected to work in the polar region in the future, as there is expected to be less snow and a higher number of freeze-thaw days in the future. In addition, adjustments to the ice decay equation and the applied parameter values would be needed for predicting ice decay processes in future. Under fast climatic warming of the arctic and subarctic, the shortening frozen period may also induce an earlier and prolonged season of bank erosion in meandering rivers, which further complicates the predictions of river morphodynamics. Thus, the use of improved hydro- and morphodynamic models and high-accuracy spatial and temporal data for better calibrating these models, are essential for detecting seasonally varying feedback effects of different interacting processes on river hydro-morphodynamics at present and in the future.</p>

On the myths in hydrology and in other earth sciences

Following scientific myths, which are widely spread in hydrology and in other earth sciences, are discussed. (1) The total water mass on land surface statistically significantly diminishes during last century. (2) Many time series of annual river runoff demonstrate nonstationary character. (3) The first-order Markov chain is a dominating model in the stochastic description of the long time series of annual runoff. (4) Because of the global heating, annual discharges of the northern rivers will inevitably grow during the 21st century. (5) The main contribution to uncertainty of the forecast of the runoff through the end of the 21st century is made by uncertainty in scenarios of emission of greenhouse gases and divergences in results of modeling of the climatic system by GCMs. (6) The most shocking myth: the idea of the deterministic positive trend within the mean global temperature during last 100 years.