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Drylands are an important ecosystem, as they cover over 40% of the Earth's land surface and are believed to be sensitive to climate change. Where dryland vegetation supports pastoralist livestock production, catastrophic ecological shifts present a grave concern because of the direct coupling between the quality of available forage and human livelihoods. In this research we investigate the organization of vegetation on hillslopes by developing a relatively simple spatially explicit daily stochastic ecohydrological model. Using a 2 year observational study in central Kenya, we present an empirical patch water balance of three representative patch types, bare soil, grass, and tree. Given the recent expansion of bare areas, the system is dominated by Hortonian runoff and overland flow. By incorporating concepts of simple local interactions from complex systems we are able to simulate a range of surface flowpath convergence states across the hillslope during a rain event. The model also allows the root to canopy radius of the tree patches to vary affecting the length scale of water competition. By changing the length scales of facilitation and competition, the model demonstrates a range of most efficient hillslope water-use patterns from random to highly organized static vegetation patterns. The findings of this work support the mechanism of symmetry-breaking instabilities for pattern formation in drylands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Long-term integrity of existing wells in a CO2-rich environment is essential for ensuring that geological sequestration of CO2 will be an effective technology for mitigating greenhouse gas-induced climate change. The potential for wellbore leakage depends in part on the quality of the original construction as well as geochemical and geomechanical stresses that occur over its life-cycle. Field data are essential for assessing the integrated effect of these factors and their impact on wellbore integrity, defined as the maintenance of isolation between subsurface intervals. In this report, we investigate a 30-year-old well from a natural CO2 production reservoir using a suite of downhole and laboratory tests to characterize isolation performance. These tests included mineralogical and hydrological characterization of 10 core samples of casing/cement/formation, wireline surveys to evaluate well conditions, fluid samples and an in situ permeability test. We find evidence for CO2 migration in the occurrence of carbonated cement and calculate that the effective permeability of an 11′-region of the wellbore barrier system was between 0.5 and 1milliDarcy. Despite these observations, we find that the amount of fluid migration along the wellbore was probably small because of several factors: the amount of carbonation decreased with distance from the reservoir, cement permeability was low (0.3–30microDarcy), the cement–casing and cement-formation interfaces were tight, the casing was not corroded, fluid samples lacked CO2, and the pressure gradient between reservoir and caprock was maintained. We conclude that the barrier system has ultimately performed well over the last 3 decades. These results will be used as part of a broader effort to develop a long-term predictive simulation tool to assess wellbore integrity performance in CO2 storage sites. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The relentless increase of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and the associated concerns about climate change have motivated new ideas about carbon-constrained energy production. One technological approach to control carbon dioxide emissions is carbon capture and storage, or CCS. The underlying idea of CCS is to capture the carbon before it emitted to the atmosphere and store it somewhere other than the atmosphere. Currently, the most attractive option for large-scale storage is in deep geological formations, including deep saline aquifers. Many physical and chemical processes can affect the fate of the injected CO2, with the overall mathematical description of the complete system becoming very complex. Our approach to the problem has been to reduce complexity as much as possible, so that we can focus on the few truly important questions about the injected CO2, most of which involve leakage out of the injection formation. Toward this end, we have established a set of simplifying assumptions that allow us to derive simplified models, which can be solved numerically or, for the most simplified cases, analytically. These simplified models allow calculation of solutions to large-scale injection and leakage problems in ways that traditional multicomponent multiphase simulators cannot. Such simplified models provide important tools for system analysis, screening calculations, and overall risk-assessment calculations. We believe this is a practical and important approach to model geological storage of carbon dioxide. It also serves as an example of how complex systems can be simplified while retaining the essential physics of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a quantitative ecohydrological framework for predicting regional distribution patterns of woody species in dryland ecosystems. The framework is based on an existing stochastic model for the daily mass balance of water that represents the interactions between soils, climate, and vegetation. Individual species selection is based on an optimality trade-off hypothesis, which states that dryland vegetation patterns are constrained by maximization of water use and simultaneous minimization of water stress. The relative importance of water use and stress avoidance to the overall fitness of three Acacia species is determined from the heterogeneous basin, the Upper Ewaso Ng’iro river basin, of the central Kenya highlands. The model results indicate that overall fitness is more strongly influenced by water use than stress avoidance but that consideration of both stress avoidance and water use is critical to predicting basin-scale patterns of species distribution. We identify a linear trend in the frequency and intensity of storms with the same annual total using a basin-wide gauge precipitation dataset. After calibration, we apply the basin average linear trends in time for average rain per storm and storm arrival rates. The model results indicate the upslope migration of two species, Acacia tortilis and Acacia xanthophloea to areas with higher total rainfall. Lastly, we explore the modeled changes of species cover in the basin influenced by changes in rainfall total holding growing season rainfall variability constant and changes in growing season rainfall variability holding total rainfall constant. We find that changes in dryland species distribution patterns and relative abundance may be as sensitive to growing season rainfall variability as they are to changes in total rainfall amounts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]