As part of the controlled release experiments at the Ginninderra test site, geophysical surveys have been acquired using electromagnetic techniques at a range of frequencies. The primary objective was to assess whether these could provide insight into the soil structure at the site, give guidance as to where to monitor for leakage, and provide additional information that may explain the observed sub-surface and surface CO2 migration behavior. A secondary objective was to assess whether CO2 leaks could be located based on secondary impacts such as drying of the soil profile. Ground penetrating radar surveys were taken during the second release experiment (October - December 2012). Different frequency shielded antennas were trialled in order to optimize the signal. Two surveys were conducted: one baseline survey prior to CO2 release and another during the release experiment. The GPR results show a reduction in range and clear reflections to the west indicating that clay was present. To the east we see clearer reflections from sand layers and the water table. These observations corresponded with larger scale sub-surface soil features determined from EM31 and EM38 electromagnetic surveys. Application of these geophysical surveys for CO2 leak detection and monitoring design are discussed. Paper for CO2CRC Research Symposium 2013

<b>This record has been superseded by eCat 126310</b> <p>Geoscience Australia defines a borehole as the generalized term for any narrow shaft drilled in the ground, either vertically or horizontally, and includes Mineral Drillholes, Petroleum Wells and Water Bores along with a variety of others types, but does not include Costean, Trench or Pit. <p>For the purpose of a borehole as defined by GeoSciML Borehole, the dataset has been restricted to onshore and offshore Australian boreholes, and bores that have the potential to support geological investigations and assessment of a variety of resources.

This resource contains bathymetry and backscatter data for the Oceanic Shoals Commonwealth Marine Reserve (CMR) in the Timor Sea collected by Geoscience Australia during September and October 2012 on RV Solander (survey GA0339/SOL5650). The survey used a Kongsberg EM3002 300 kHz multibeam sonar system mounted in single head configuration to map four areas, covering a combined area of 507 square kilometres. Data are gridded to 2 m spatial resolution. The Oceanic Shoals Commonwealth Marine Reserve survey was undertaken as an activity within the Australian Government's National Environmental Research Program Marine Biodiversity Hub and was the key component of Research Theme 4 - Regional Biodiversity Discovery to Support Marine Bioregional Plans. Hub partners involved in the survey included the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Geoscience Australia, the University of Western Australia, Museum Victoria and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Data acquired during the survey included: multibeam sonar bathymetry and acoustic backscatter; sub-bottom acoustic profiles; physical samples of seabed sediments, infauna and epibenthic biota; towed underwater video and still camera observations of seabed habitats; baited video observations of demersal and pelagic fish, and; oceanographic measurements of the water column from CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) casts and from deployment of sea surface drifters. Further information on the survey is available in the post-survey report published as Geoscience Australia Record 2013/38 (Nichol et al. 2013).

Geoscience Australia undertook a marine survey of the Vlaming Sub-basin in March and April 2012 to provide seabed and shallow geological information to support an assessment of the CO2 storage potential of this sedimentary basin. The survey was undertaken under the Australian Government's National CO2 Infrastructure Plan (NCIP) to help identify sites suitable for the long term storage of CO2 within reasonable distances of major sources of CO2 emissions. The Vlaming Sub-basin is located offshore from Perth, Western Australia, and was previously identified by the Carbon Storage Taskforce (2009) as potentially highly suitable for CO2 storage. The principal aim of the Vlaming Sub-basin marine survey (GA survey number GA334) was to look for evidence of any past or current gas or fluid seepage at the seabed, and to determine whether these features are related to structures (e.g. faults) in the Vlaming Sub-basin that may extend up to the seabed. The survey also mapped seabed habitats and biota in the areas of interest to provide information on communities and biophysical features that may be associated with seepage. This research addresses key questions on the potential for containment of CO2 in the Early Cretaceous Gage Sandstone (the basin's proposed CO2 storage unit) and the regional integrity of the South Perth Shale (the seal unit that overlies the Gage Sandstone). This dataset comprises high resolution backscatter grids.

Geoscience Australia undertook a marine survey of the Vlaming Sub-basin in March and April 2012 to provide seabed and shallow geological information to support an assessment of the CO2 storage potential of this sedimentary basin. The survey was undertaken under the Australian Government's National CO2 Infrastructure Plan (NCIP) to help identify sites suitable for the long term storage of CO2 within reasonable distances of major sources of CO2 emissions. The Vlaming Sub-basin is located offshore from Perth, Western Australia, and was previously identified by the Carbon Storage Taskforce (2009) as potentially highly suitable for CO2 storage. The principal aim of the Vlaming Sub-basin marine survey (GA survey number GA334) was to look for evidence of any past or current gas or fluid seepage at the seabed, and to determine whether these features are related to structures (e.g. faults) in the Vlaming Sub-basin that may extend up to the seabed. The survey also mapped seabed habitats and biota in the areas of interest to provide information on communities and biophysical features that may be associated with seepage. This research addresses key questions on the potential for containment of CO2 in the Early Cretaceous Gage Sandstone (the basin's proposed CO2 storage unit) and the regional integrity of the South Perth Shale (the seal unit that overlies the Gage Sandstone). This dataset comprises sidescan grids.

<p>This resource contains multibeam backscatter data for Bynoe Harbour collected by Geoscience Australia (GA), the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the Northern Territory Government (Department of Environment and Natural Resources) during the period between 3 and 27 May 2016 on the RV Solander (survey SOL6187/GA0351). This project was made possible through offset funds provided by INPEX-led Ichthys LNG Project to Northern Territory Government Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and co-investment from Geoscience Australia and Australian Institute of Marine Science. The intent of this four year (2014-2018) program is to improve knowledge of the marine environments in the Darwin and Bynoe Harbour regions by collating and collecting baseline data that enable the creation of thematic habitat maps that underpin marine resource management decisions. <p>The specific objectives of the survey were to: <p>1. Obtain high resolution geophysical (bathymetry) data for Bynoe Harbour; <p>2. Characterise substrates (acoustic backscatter properties, grainsize, sediment chemistry) for Bynoe Harbour; and <p>3. Collect tidal data for the survey area. Data acquired during the survey included: multibeam sonar bathymetry and acoustic backscatter; physical samples of seabed sediments, underwater photography and video of grab sample locations and oceanographic information including tidal data and sound velocity profiles. <p>This dataset comprises multibeam backscatter data. A detailed account of the survey is provided in: Siwabessy, P.J.W., Smit, N., Atkinson, I., Dando, N., Harries, S., Howard, F.J.F., Li, J., Nicholas W.A., Picard, K., Radke, L.C., Tran, M., Williams, D. and Whiteway, T. 2016. Bynoe Harbour Marine Survey 2016: GA4452/SOL6432 – Post-survey report. Record 2017/04. Geoscience Australia, Canberra. http://dx.doi.org/10.11636/Record.2017.004.

Geoscience Australia defines a sample as a feature observed, measured or collected in the field. A specimen is a physical individual sample collected during the field work. This data set represents a subset of all Sampling data held by Geoscience Australia that have been collected as part of drilling activities (ie relate to Australian Boreholes). The data will be utilised by other data domains by providing Sampling context to various Observation & Measurement data.

Abstract: Land Surface Temperature (Ts) is an important boundary condition in many land surface modelling schemes. It is also important in other application areas such as, hydrology, urban environmental monitoring, agriculture, ecological and bushfire monitoring. Many studies have shown that it is possible to retrieve Ts on a global scale using thermal infrared data from satellites. Development of standard methodologies that generate Ts products routinely would be of broad benefit to the application of remote sensing data in areas such as hydrology and urban monitoring. AVHRR and MODIS datasets are routinely used to deliver Ts products. However, these data have 1km spatial resolution, which is too coarse to detect the detailed variation of land surface change of concern in many applications, especially in heterogeneous areas. Higher resolution thermal data from Landsat is a possible option in such cases. To derive Ts, two scientific problems need to be resolved: to remove the atmospheric effects and derive surface brightness temperature (TB) and to separate the emissivity and Ts effects in the surface brightness temperature (TB). To derive TB, for single thermal band sensors such as, Landsat 5, 7 and (due to a faulty dual-band thermal instrument) on Landsat-8, the split window methods, such as those used for NOAAAVHRR data (Becker & Li, 1990), and the day/night pairs of thermal infrared data in several bands, as used for MODIS (Wan et al., 2002) are not available for correcting atmospheric effects. The retrieval of surface brightness temperature TB from Landsat data therefore needs more care, as the accuracy of the TB retrieval depends critically on the ancillary data, such as atmospheric water vapour data (precipitable water). In this paper, a feasible operational method to remove the atmospheric effects and retrieve surface brightness temperature from Landsat data is presented. The method uses the MODTRAN 5 radiative transfer model and global atmospheric profile data sets, such as NASA MERRA (The Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications) atmospheric profiles, NOAA NCEP (National Center for Environmental Prediction) reanalysis product and ECMWF (The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) to correct for the atmospheric effects. The results derived from the global atmospheric profiles are assessed against the TB product estimated by using (accurate) ground based radiosonde data (balloon data). The results from this study have found: The global data sets NCEP1, NCEP2, MERRA and ECMWF can all generally give satisfactory TB products and can meet the levels of accuracy demanded by many practitioners, such as 1º K. Among global data sets, ECMWF data set performs best. The root mean square difference (RMSD) for the 9 days and 3 test sites are all within 0.4º K when compared with the TB products estimated using ground radiosonde measurements.

We have developed a Building Fire Impact Model to evaluate the probability that a building located in a peri-urban region of a community is affected/destroyed by a forest fire. The methodology is based on a well-known mathematical technique called Event Tree (ET) modeling, which is a useful graphical way of representing the dependency of events. The tree nodes are the event itself, and the branches are formed with the probability of the event happening. If the event can be represented by a discrete random variable, the number of possible realisations of the event and their corresponding probability of occurring, conditional on the realisations of the previous event, is given by the branches. As the probability of each event is displayed conditional on the occurrence of events that precede it in the tree, the joint probability of the simultaneous occurrence of events that constitute a path is found by multiplication (Hasofer et al., 2007). BFIM contains a basic implementation of the main elements of bushfire characteristics, house vulnerability and human intervention. In the first pass of the BFIM model, the characteristics of the bushfire in the neighboring region to the house is considered as well as the characteristics of the house and the occupants of the house. In the second pass, the number of embers impacting on the house is adjusted for human intervention and wind damage. In the third pass, the model examines house by house conditions to determine what houses have been burnt and their impact on neighboring houses. To illustrate the model application, a community involved in the 2009 Victorian bushfires has been studied and the event post-disaster impact assessment is utilized to validate the model outcomes. MODSIM 2013 Conference

Wind multipliers are factors that transform regional wind speeds into local wind speeds, accounting for the local effects which include topographical, terrain and shielding influences. Wind multipliers have been successfully utilized in various wind related activities such as wind hazard assessment (engineering building code applications), event-based wind impact assessments (tropical cyclones), and also national scale wind risk assessment. The work of McArthur in developing the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI: Luke and McArthur, 1978) indicates that the contribution of wind speed to the FFDI is about 45% of the magnitude, indicating the importance of determining an accurate local wind speed in bushfire hazard and spread calculations. For bushfire spread modeling, local site variation (@ 100 metre and also 25 metre horizontal resolution) have been considered through the use of wind multipliers, and this has resulted in a significant difference to the currently utilized regional '10 metre height' wind speed (and further to the impact analysis). A series of wind multipliers have been developed for three historic bushfire case study areas; the 2009 Victorian fires (Kilmore fire), the 2005 Wangary fire (Eyre Peninsula), and the 2001 Warragamba - Mt. Hall fire (Western Sydney). This paper describes the development of wind multiplier computation methodology and the application of wind multipliers to bushfire hazard and impact analysis. The efficacy of using wind multipliers within a bushfire spread hazard model is evaluated by considering case study comparisons of fire extent, shape and impact against post-disaster impact assessments. The analysis has determined that it is important to consider wind multipliers for local wind speed determination in order to achieve reliable fire spread and impact results. From AMSA 2013 conference