2014 Open Day Promotional Material

This report provides background information about the Ginninderra controlled release Experiment 2 including a description of the environmental and weather conditions during the experiment, the groundwater levels and a brief description of all the monitoring techniques that were trialled during the experiment. Release of CO2 began 26 October 2012 at 2:25 PM and stopped 21 December 2012 at 1:30 PM. The total CO2 release rate during Experiment 2 was 218 kg/d CO2. The aim of the second Ginninderra controlled release was to artificially simulate the leakage of CO2 along a line source, to represent leakage along a fault. Multiple methods and techniques were then trialled in order to assess their abilities to: - detect that a leak was present - pinpoint the location of the leak - identify the strength of the leak - monitor how the CO2 behaves in the sub-surface - assess the effects it may have on plant health Several monitoring and assessment techniques were trialled for their effectiveness to quantify and qualify the CO2 that was release. This experiment had a focus on plant health indicators to assess the aims listed above, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of monitoring plant health and the use of geophysical methods to identify that a CO2 leak may be present. The methods are described in this report and include: - soil gas - airborne hyperspectral surveys - plant health (PhenoMobile) - soil CO2 flux - electromagnetic (EM-31) - electromagnetic (EM-38) - ground penetrating radar (GPR) This report is a reference guide to describe the Ginninderra Experiment 2 details. Only methods are described in this report with the results of the study published in conference papers and future journal articles.

This collaborative project between Geoscience Australia (GA) and CSIRO aims to use physicochemical measurements, collected from surface overbank sediments as part of the National Geochemical Survey of Australia (NGSA) project, to help validate the ASTER multispectral geoscience maps of Australia. Both data sets have common information including that related to the surface abundance of silica, aluminium, iron, clay, sand and volatiles (including carbonate). The ASTER geoscience maps also provide spatial information about trends of mineral composition, which are potentially related to pH and oxidation state.

Knowledge of the nature of buildings within business areas is fundamental to a broad range of decision making processes, including planning, emergency management and mitigating the impact of natural disasters. To support these activities, Geoscience Australia has developed a building information system called the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS) which provides information on buildings across Australia. Most of the building information in NEXIS is statistically derived, but efforts are being made to include more detailed information on the nature of individual buildings, particularly in flood prone areas. This is being achieved in Bundaberg through field survey work.

The 'Major crustal boundaries of Australia' map synthesises more than 30 years of acquisition of deep seismic reflection data across Australia, where major crustal-scale breaks, often inferred to be relict sutures between different crustal blocks, have been interpreted in the seismic reflection profiles. The widespread coverage of the seismic profiles now provides the opportunity to construct a map of major crustal boundaries across Australia. Starting with the locations of the crustal breaks identified in the seismic profiles, geological (e.g. outcrop mapping, drill hole, geochronology, isotope) and geophysical (e.g. gravity, aeromagnetic, magnetotelluric) data are used to map the crustal boundaries, in map view, away from the seismic profiles. For some of these boundaries, a high level of confidence can be placed on the location, whereas the location of other boundaries can only be considered to have medium or low confidence. In other areas, especially in regions covered by thick sedimentary successions, the locations of some crustal boundaries are essentially unconstrained. The 'Major crustal boundaries of Australia' map shows the locations of inferred ancient plate boundaries, and will provide constraints on the three dimensional architecture of Australia. It allows a better understanding of how the Australian continent was constructed from the Mesoarchean through to the Phanerozoic, and how this evolution and these boundaries have controlled metallogenesis. It is best viewed as a dynamic dataset, which will need to be refined and updated as new information, such as new seismic reflection data, becomes available.

Geochemical surveys collect sediment or rock samples, measure the concentration of chemical elements and report these typically either in weight percent or in parts per million. There are usually a large number of elements measured and the distributions are often skewed, containing many potential outliers. We present a new robust principal component analysis (PCA) method for geochemical survey data, which involves first transforming the compositional data onto various different manifolds using power transformations. A flexible set of moment assumptions are made which take the special geometry of each manifold into account. The Kent distribution moment structure arises as a special case when the chosen manifold is the hypersphere. We derive simple moment and robust estimators of the parameters which are also applicable in high dimensional settings. The resulting PCA based on these estimators is effectively done in the tangent space and is closely related to the power transformation method used in correspondence analysis. To illustrate, we analyse major oxide data from the National Geochemical Survey of Australia. When compared with the traditional approach in the literature based on the centred logratio transformation, the new PCA method is shown to be more successful at dimension reduction and gives more interpretable results.

We have developed an autonomous CO2 monitoring station, based around the Vaisala GMP343 sensor. The station is powered by a solar panel and incorporates a data logger and a directional antenna for line-of-sight wireless communication with a base station. The base station communicates via the Telstra mobile phone data network. The concept of atmospheric tomography was tested at the Ginninderra site and proved very successful as a method of locating and quantifying a spatially small release of CO2. In this case the sensors were separated from the source by 40 m. The opportunity to test the method over a larger distance arose during the controlled release of Buttress gas during the stage 2B experiment at the Otway site. Gas was released at 8 tpd during daylight hours, and an approximate ring of 8 monitoring stations was deployed around the release point; the ring was about 800 m in diameter. Gas was released on 12 occasions, chosen to match wind directions that would carry the plume in the direction of one of the sensors. The dataset was too limited to carry out the full-scale Bayesian inversion that was demonstrated in the Ginninderra test (which lasted two months) but a simple inversion was possible. This located the source of the release correctly to within 20 m. The test demonstrated that inexpensive sensors could achieve enough stability and sensitivity to work (in this particular application) at the few ppm level. Moreover quite simple dispersion models could be used to predict plume geometry up to 500 m from the release. Overall the experiment indicates the basis of an inexpensive method for remotely monitoring areas of around a km2 for spatially small leakages.

Version 1 of the Water Theme of the Land Cover of Australia (Water25) is an ISO 19144-2 classification of the percentage of successful observations from Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ sensors in which water was detected. Each satellite image pixel is an observation; Successful observations are those in which the land surface is clearly seen (unobscured by clouds for example) and quality checks are passed. Classes: - Perennial (water observed more than 75% of the time) - Non-perennial 60%-75% (water observed from 60 to 75% of the time) - Non perennial 30%-60% (water observed from 30 to 60% of the time) - Non perennial 8%-30% (water observed from 8% to 30% of the time) - Land subject to infrequent inundation 1%+ (water observed from 1% to 8% of the time) - No water observed Water25 can be used to map and characterise inland water bodies and provides information about the observed extent of inundation for waterways and floodplains. It is a resource for both users and providers of information about surface water permanence and the extent and frequency of inundation. Potential users include government agencies, research institutions, the general public and academia.

Earth's drylands, where precipitation is <0.65 the effective evaporation, are most at risk to the land degradation processes of desertification, especially the loss of the agriculturally productive clay mineral component by wind erosion. The eroded dust can then impact on atmospheric and marine processes as well as human health. Twenty years after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, progress ameliorating desertification is failing with the amount of degrading land increasing with the problem compounded by our slow progress to even find suitable measures for accurate mapping and monitoring. Here we show how an Earth Observation (EO) system with combined SWIR (shortwave infrared) and TIR (thermal Infrared) capability can be used to quantify the proportion of clay mineral content (easily eroded by wind) to the quartz sand content (left as a residual at the surface). This opportunity is demonstrated using the Australian ASTER SWIR reflectance and TIR emissivity mosaics and was validated using published field/laboratory sample data. Given resources, the available ASTER archive can be used to generate global maps of the status of clay to quartz sand. However, future monitoring will require new EO systems that scan SWIR+TIR wavelengths (like HyspIRI) as the ASTER SWIR module is no longer functional.

1 map showing the Acreage Release Title W15-3 in the area of Overlapping Jurisdiction in the Perth Treaty. Requested by RET August 2014. LOSAMBA register 707