Access to high quality exploration data is essential to effectively assess exploration risk. To encourage exploration in its many under-explored regions, Australia has traditionally maintained better access to government geoscience and petroleum exploration data than almost anywhere else in the world. Access to petroleum exploration information has been facilitated by legislation requiring data submission and availability, and by the provision of pre-competitive studies by government agencies. This is coupled with an aggressive, globally and yearly promoted, acreage release program. Recent initiatives however have improved access even more. The Australian government has an active new program of data acquisition in poorly explored areas and the recently announced Spatial Information and Data Access Policy requires that basic data be made available at the marginal cost of transfer, or is free if via the internet. Available information includes basic field data, comprising well, seismic and other survey data, interpretative data developed as part of petroleum prospectivity assessments by industry, and pre-competitive data sets and studies carried out by government. To facilitate access, and use of these data sets, the Australian government has made publicly available, relational digital databases containing information such as source rock potential, reservoir properties, shows, biostratigraphy, and well, and survey details. Parameters from databases can be plotted on-line. The information is free via the internet, and data can be downloaded in a variety of formats for use by explorers. Seismic field data, for reprocessing or interpretation, can be ordered from the on-line survey database at minimal cost and is heavily used by industry. Currently, 5 terabytes of seismic field data are borrowed each year from the Australian Government for reprocessing. The main borrowers are petroleum companies followed by data contractors. So that explorers can access any onshore or offshore information, a single geoscience portal on the internet has been developed http://www.geoscience.gov.au/. Moreover, the Australian Government, through Geoscience Australia is conducting regional studies of petroleum prospectivity of the offshore jurisdiction to assist explorers. Access to petroleum exploration data has been subject to legislation since the 1950s when the Petroleum Search Subsidy Act subsidised exploration and required that exploration data to be submitted for subsequent release after a relatively brief confidentiality period. The requirement to lodge exploration data was retained in the Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Act in 1967, whereas, subsidy for exploration was then discontinued. The Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Act in its current form is still in operation in Australia. The current ready access to petroleum exploration data has been of considerable assistance to companies in their exploration and in discovery of significant petroleum reserves in offshore Australia. Australia had one of the highest rates in the world in discovery of barrels of oil equivalent per year. The methods of making exploration data as conveniently accessible to explorers as possible are constantly being addressed with a view to further encouraging exploration and to maintaining Australia?s high exploration success.

The ENE-trending Mallina Basin developed in the central part of the Pilbara Craton, NW Australia, between c. 3010 and 2940 Ma, over the boundary between two distinct terrains characterised by greenstones aged c. 3120 and older. The basin preserves an association of igneous rocks characterised by an unusual combination of high-Mg and high LILE concentrations, that provides valuable insight into the geological evolution of the region. The oldest dated components of the Mallina Basin are c. 3010 Ma volcaniclastic rocks found only in the far northwest. Geochronology and field relationships indicate that the main basin deposition, of clastic rocks, occurred from 2970 to 2955 Ma. Towards the end of this depositional phase, siliceous high-Mg basalts (SHMB) formed the upper part of the stratigraphy in the northwestern part of the basin (Whim Creek Belt), and their subvolcanic equivalents intruded the southern part of the basin. Sedimentation was terminated by ESE?WNW compression at c. 2955-2950 Ma. Rocks with boninitic compositions and spatially associated low-Ti tholeiitic gabbro formed sub-volcanic sills in coarse siliciclastic rocks in the southern part of the basin, probably during the waning stages of compression. Immediately after compression, an extensive alkaline granite complex was emplaced into the central and northern part of the basin, coeval with intrusion of a 2955-2945 Ma high-Mg diorite (or sanukitoid) suite. Renewed extension also resulted in renewed basin sedimentation between 2945 and 2935 Ma. Voluminous high-K monzogranite swamped the region between c. 2935 and 2930 Ma, particularly adjacent to, and south of the basin, and was early- to syn-tectonic with respect to SE-NW compression. Monzogranite magmatism becomes systematically younger and less voluminous away from the Mallina Basin.

24-30th August, 1990, Nottingham, U.K.

There are three district methodologies that thrive to describe science and scientific processes through their methodologies: Metadata, Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and Ontology. All three methodologies have to be utilised by the practicing data stewards to provide the whole picture and ensure transparency for scientific processes from the data acquisition to creation of scientific concepts and models.

This extended abstract discusses geological interpretation of the regional Pine Creek airborne electromagnetic survey and implications for the prospectivity of uranium and gold mineral systems in the Pine Creek region

Development of coal mines and coal seam gas (CSG) resources can significantly impact groundwater systems, hydrogeological processes and the surface environment. Consequently, a sound understanding of basin-scale hydrogeology Is critical to developing effective water management strategies. The Australian Government Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities recently funded investigation of the potential impacts of the development of coal mining and CSG production in several Australian coal basins. The Laura Basin was investigated as part of this program due to the significant environmental and cultural heritage values of the region which include several National Parks and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The Laura Basin is a geological basin on Cape York Peninsula, QLD. There has been relatively limited development of the groundwater resources of the basin to date, which predominantly occur in Mesozoic sandstone units, the Dalrymple Sandstone and the Gilbert River Formation, which are contiguous with the Great Artesian Basin rocks of the Carpentaria Basin.

In the literature of remote sensing image analysis, an endmember is defined as a pixel containing only one land cover substance. However, with the varying resolutions of available sensors, in most cases a single pixel in a satellite image contains more than one type of land cover substance. One challenge is to decompose a pixel with mixed spectral readings into a set of endmembers, and estimate the corresponding abundance fractions. The linear spectral unmixing model assumes that spectral reading of a single pixel is a linear combination of spectral readings from a set of endmembers. Most linear spectral unmixing algorithms rely on spectral signatures from endmembers in pre-defined libraries obtained from previous on-ground studies. Therefore, the applications of these algorithms are restricted to images whose extent and acquisition time coincide with those of the endmember library. We propose a linear spectral unmixing algorithm which is able to identify a set of endmembers from the actual image of the studied area. Existing spectral libraries are used as training sets to infer a model which determines the class labels of the derived image based endmembers. The advantage of such approach is that it is capable of performing consistent spectral unmixing in areas with no established endmember libraries. Testing has been conducted on a Landsat7 ETM+ image subset of the Gwydir region acquired on Jun 22, 2008. Three types of land cover classes: bare soil, green vegetation and non-photosynthetic are specified for this test. A set consisting of 150 endmember samples and a number of ground abundance observations were obtained from a corresponding field trip. The study successfully identified an endmember set from the image for the specified land cover classes. For most test points, the spectral unmixing and estimation of the corresponding abundance are consistent with the ground validation data.

Mapping the variations between average air temperature and ground surface temperature

A study of the consistency of gust wind speed records from two types of recording instruments has been undertaken. The study examined the Bureau of Meteorology's (BoM) wind speed records in order to establish the existence of bias between coincident records obtained by the old pressure-tube Dines anemometers and the records obtained by the new cup anemometers. This study was an important step towards assessing the quality and consistency of gust wind speed records that form the basis of the Australian Standards/NZ Standards for design of buildings for wind actions (AS/NZS 1170.2:2011 and AS 4055:2006). The Building Code of Australia (BCA) requires that buildings in Australia meet the specifications described in the two standards. BoM has been recording peak gust wind speed observations in the Australian region for over 70 years. The Australia/New Zealand Wind Actions Standard as well as the wind engineering community in general rely on these peak gust wind speed observations to determine wind loads on buildings and infrastructure. In the mid-1980s BoM commenced a program to replace the aging Dines anemometers with Synchrotac and Almos cup anemometers. During the anemometer replacement procedure, many localities had both types of anemometers recording extreme events. This allowed us to compare severe wind recordings of both instruments to assess the consistency of the recordings. The results show that the Dines anemometer measures higher gust wind speeds than the 3-cup anemometer when the same wind gust is considered. The bias varies with the wind speed and ranges from 5 to 17%. This poster presents the methodology and main outcomes from the assessment of coincident measurements of gust wind speed.

CONTROL ID: 1813538 TITLE: 'Big Data' can make a big difference: Applying Big Data to National Scale Change Analyses AUTHORS (FIRST NAME, LAST NAME): Norman Roland Mueller1, Steven Curnow1, Rachel Melrose1, Matthew Brian John Purss1, Adam Lewis1 INSTITUTIONS (ALL): 1. Geoscience Australia, Canberra, ACT, Australia. ABSTRACT BODY: The traditional method of change detection in remote sensing is based on acquiring a pair of images and conducting a set of analyses to determine what is different between them. The end result is a single change analysis for a single time period. While this may be repeated several times, it is generally a time consuming, often manual process providing a series of snapshots of change. As datasets become larger, and time series analyses become more sophisticated, these traditional methods of analysis are unviable. The Geoscience Australia 'Data Cube' provides a 25-year time series of all Landsat-5 and Landsat-7 data for the entire Australian continent. Each image is orthorectified to a standard set of pixel locations and is fully calibrated to a measure of surface reflectance (the 25m Australian Reflectance Grid [ARG25]). These surface reflectance measurements are directly comparable, between different scenes, and regardless of whether they are sourced from the Landsat-5 TM instrument or the Landsat-7 ETM+. The advantage of the Data Cube environment lies in the ability to apply an algorithm to every pixel across Australia (some 1013 pixels) in a consistent way, enabling change analysis for every acquired observation. This provides a framework to analyse change through time on a scene to scene basis, and across national-scale areas for the entire duration of the archive. Two examples of applications of the Data Cube are described here: surface water extent mapping across Australia; and vegetation condition mapping across the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia's largest river system.. Ongoing water mapping and vegetation condition mapping is required by the Australian government to produce information products for a range of requirements including ecological monitoring and emergency management risk planning. With a 25 year archive of Landsat-5 and Landsat-7 imagery hosted on an efficient High Performance Computing (HPC) environment, high speed analyses of long time series for water and vegetation condition are now viable. www.ga.gov.au KEYWORDS: 1906 INFORMATICS Computational models, algorithms, 1988 INFORMATICS Temporal analysis and representation, 1980 INFORMATICS Spatial analysis and representation. (No Image Selected) (No Table Selected) Additional Details Previously Presented Material: Contact Details CONTACT (NAME ONLY): Norman Mueller CONTACT (E-MAIL ONLY): norman.mueller@ga.gov.au TITLE OF TEAM: