Jarosław Zawadzki

Statistical analysis of soil moisture content changes in Central Europe using GLDAS database over three past decades

This paper examine soil moisture trends changes in inhomogeneous area of Central European countries — Poland, the Czech Republic and neighbouring territories. The area suffered from the lack of large-scale soil parameters research. Most of them are limited to ground measurements performed for a small part of land. Although there were extensive water conditions studies performed for the whole Europe, such as drought analysis, they were focused on Western European countries, neglecting situation in Central Europe (taking exception to Austria). The NOAH model of Global Land Data Assimilation System database has been used as a data source. It delivers one degree spatial resolution data and variables which describe soil moisture values for four depth levels (0–10 cm, 10–40 cm, 40–100 cm and 100–200 cm). Data covering years 1979–2011 has been averaged in order to analyse summer and winter terms separately. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis have been prepared on the software Statistica, Research reveals that area is losing water content. Due to promising results of water content trend analysis, the authors plan to run a large-scale analysis using other variables from the GLDAS database, especially concerning soil temperature and evapotranspiration.

The geostatistical reassessment of soil contamination with lead in metropolitan Warsaw and its vicinity

Soils of urban agglomerations are often exposed to pollution with lead, which high concentrations are frequently observed. The main sources of lead contamination are airborne particulate depositions and exhaust fumes. The study area encompassed Warsaw city, outskirts and fragments of Kampinoski National and Mazowiecki Landscape Parks. The scope of the study was to analyse the spatial distribution of lead content in soils using ordinary kriging and sequential Gaussian simulation, distinct from previously applied (in 1992) the least curvature method. Results show that lead concentrations are relatively low and only a few areas are characterised by high risk of contamination.

Simple Method of Forest Type Inventory by Joining Low Resolution Remote Sensing of Vegetation Indices with Spatial Information from the Corine Land Cover Database

The paper presents a simple, inexpensive, and effective method allowing for frequent classification of the forest type coniferous, deciduous, and mixed using medium and low resolution remote sensing images. The proposed method is based on the set of vegetation indices such as NDVI, LAI, FAPAR, and LAIxCab calculated from MODIS and MERIS satellite data. The method uses seasonal changes of the above-mentioned vegetation indices within annual cycle. The main idea was to collect and carefully analyse seasonal changes in vegetation indices in a given ecosystem type proven by a Corine Land Cover, 2006 database, and to compare them afterwards with those of a particular forest under study. Each type of a forest ecosystem has its own specific dynamics of development, thus enabling recognition of the type by comparing temporal changes of the proposed measures based on vegetation indices. Temporal measures of changes were created for selected reference stands by the ratios of particular indices determined in July and April, which are the middle and the beginning of a vegetation season in Poland, respectively. The analysed vegetation indices were additionally provided with chosen statistical measures. The statistical analyses were carried out for Poland’s main national parks which represent the natural stands of temperate climate.

Impact of an iron mine and a nickel smelter at the Norwegian/Russian border close to the Barents Sea on surface soil magnetic susceptibility and content of potentially toxic elements

An important problem in soil magnetometry is unraveling the soil contamination signal in areas with multiple emitters. Here, geophysical and geochemical measurements were performed at four sites on a north - south transect along the Pasvik River in the Barents Region (northern Norway). These sites are influenced by depositions from the Bjørnevatn iron mine and a Ni-Cu smelter in Nikel, Russia. To relate the degree and type of pollution from these sources to the corresponding magnetic signal, the topsoil concentrations of 12 Potentially Toxic Elements (PTEs) (As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mo, Ni, Pb, Se, Ti, Zn), were determined, magnetic hysteresis parameters and thermomagnetic properties were measured. In situ magnetic low-field susceptibility decreases from north to south with increasing distance from the iron mine. Relatively large magnetic multidomain grains of magnetite and/or titanomagnetite are responsible for the strong magnetic signal from the topsoil close to Bjørnevatn. These particles are related to increased enrichment factors of As, Mo and Cu, yielding high positive correlation coefficients with susceptibility values. At a site furthest away from the iron mine and located 7 km from the Ni-Cu smelter magnetic susceptibility values are much lower but significant positive correlations on the level of p < .1 with 8 PTEs (Ni, Cu, Co, Se, As, Zn, Cd, Cr) have been observed. The magnetic signal in this area is due to fine-grained primary sulphides and secondary fine-grained magnetite and/or maghemite.

Vehicle Hydrocarbons’ Emission Characteristics Determined Using the Monte Carlo Method

Hydrocarbons (HCs) are products of incomplete combustion process which can occur during operation of the internal combustion engines (Flagan and Seinfeld 1988; Wallington et al. Meteorologische Zeitschrift, 17(2), 109–116, 2008). Incomplete combustion process affects the fuel consumption and engine performance (Baskar and Senthilkumar Engineering Science and Technology, an International Journal, 19, 438–443, 2016; Rakopoulos and Giakoumis 2009) also the emission of unburned HCs affects the emissions of the other air pollutants (Jung et al. Journal of Environmental Sciences, 54, 21–32, 2017; Wang et al. Journal of Environmental Sciences, 46, 28–37, 2016; Kerbachi et al. Energy Procedia, 136, 388–393, 2017). This paper presents the methodology for the investigation of HC amount emitted from internal combustion engines. It can be used for estimation of the emission factors, emissions from various vehicles and engine types, also carrying out the environmental impact assessment of various vehicles. The HC emission characteristics is defined as the dependency between the measured HC emissions (specific distance emission) and the vehicle’s velocity. The Monte Carlo simulation allows determining the HC emission’s characteristics from internal combustion engines. In the paper, five emission characteristics determined using the consecutive Monte Carlo simulations are given. In each case, the characteristic is fit using the 7th degree (order) polynomial regression. The goodness of fit is assessed using Ramsey’s RESET test, and the RMSE. The authors find application of the proposed methodology in various types of the internal combustion engines to assess their environmental properties.

Use of the temperature–vegetation dryness index for remote sensing grassland moisture conditions in the vicinity of a lignite open-cast mine

Anthropogenic activities, especially resulting in changes in the water conditions, usually disturb biological and agricultural functions of grasslands, leading to their degradation, often on large areas. Remote sensing observations of such changes in grassland ecosystems evoke a great interest, but they are still a difficult task, especially when performed on industrial and mining areas. This paper presents a new effective method of remote sensing of grassland moisture conditions based on temperature–vegetation dryness index (TVDI) calculated from free Landsat imagery, and employing the TVDI spatial variability estimated from a semivariance analysis. The practical applicability of the method is demonstrated on the example of monitoring of the extensive neighborhood of lignite open-cast mine within a period of a few years. Besides, the developed method was validated at the studied area, using in situ information. Thus, we demonstrated that TVDI may serve as an effective indicator of grassland moisture conditions, even in problematic areas.

Spatial surrogate for domestic combustion’s air emissions: A case study from Silesian Metropolis, Poland

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is improving currently applied methodology for spatial disaggregation, as well as mapping air emission inventories by taking into account the auxiliary spatial data on population density. District heating infrastructure occurring in more populated areas changes distinctly the spatial distribution of estimated air emission; however, it does not change the initial estimate. That means the total, disaggregated value is constant. Considered sources of domestic combustion are located in the central part of the Silesian Metropolis, in the southern part of Poland. A large part of this area is strongly urbanized and supplied with heat (hot water) from the district heating system. Data on population density help to determine the area within which the dwellers use heat energy and hot water supplied by the heating infrastructure, apart from heating with small domestic boilers and stoves. This causes the domestic combustion’s emission impact within the distinguished area to be significantly lower in comparison to the official guidelines on air emission inventories. The important differences in spatial air emissions distributions calculated using a top-down approach are found for strongly urbanized areas supplied partly with heat and hot water from the district heating network. This fact should be taken into account when preparing detailed, high-resolution emission inventories for air regional and local quality modeling. Implications: The spatial issues connected with elaboration of the high-resolution emission inventories are presented for the example of the populated area of the Silesian Metropolis (Poland). Spatial distribution of the population density is used to determine the area supplied with heat and hot water from the district heating system. It changes distinctly the spatial distribution of the air emission from small residential combustion sources.

Mercury Air Emission from Coal-Fired Public Power Sector: Uncertainty and Its Monthly Distribution. Case Study from Poland

The paper presents two aspects concerned with the mercury air emission inventory from coal-fired public power and energy plants: an uncertainty analysis, using Monte Carlo simulation (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 44(247), 335–341 1949) and the monthly distributions applying the Denton-Cholette approach (Dagum & Cholette 2006). The analysis determines uncertainty about the estimates mercury air emission from 1990 to 2012 including the development of air pollution control (APC) technologies in the Polish public power and energy sector, also the monthly distributions in comparison with previously obtained results (Hławiczka 2008). The uncertainty of mercury (Hg) content in fuel is 31.6% for hard coal and 42.4% for brown coal. The confidence interval for the estimated emission changed from [kg] (16,082.2; 16,242.2) in 1990 to (10,525.9;10,671.1) in 2012. However, the Denton-Cholette approach overestimates the emissions for the warmer periods of the year, but it could, however, in our view, be applied to attain the monthly distributions.

Geostatistical study of spatial correlations of lead and zinc concentration in urban reservoir. Study case Czerniakowskie Lake, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract The article presents detailed geostatistical analysis of spatial distribution of lead and zinc concentration in water, suspension and bottom sediments of large, urban lake exposed to intensive anthropogenic pressure within a large city. Systematic chemical measurements were performed at eleven cross-sections located along Czerniakowskie Lake, the largest lake in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. During the summer, the lake is used as a public bathing area, therefore, to better evaluate human impacts, field measurements were carried out in high-use seasons. It was found that the spatial distributions of aqueous lead and zinc differ during the summer and autumn. In summer several Pb and Zn hot-spots were observed, while during autumn spatial distributions of Pb and Zn were rather homogenous throughout the entire lake. Large seasonal differences in spatial distributions of Pb and Zn were found in bottom sediments. Autumn concentrations of both heavy metals were ten times higher in comparison with summer values. Clear cross-correlations of Pb and Zn concentrations in water, suspension and bottom sediments suggest that both Pb and Zn came to Czerniakowskie Lake from the same source.

Statistical analysis of data set on national reporting of emission of air pollutants. Part I: investigation of outliers / Analiza statystyczna zbioru danych pochodzącego z krajowej sprawozdawczości emisji zanieczyszczeń do powietrza, Cz. I: wykrywanie wartości odstających

Abstract The Polish emission reporting system - “Krajowa baza o emisjach gazów cieplarnianych i innych substancji” (or National Emission Database (NED)) - was established at the end of 2010. Initially (data submitted for 2010), the database contained reported emission data for greenhouse gases and air pollutants from plants that have had proper Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control permissions (i.e., integrated permission for the release of gases and dusts into the air). The emissions reported to the NED are recognised as the emissions from local sources and partly as the emissions from point sources, with the possibility of including them into a national emission inventory as point source data (in the case of air pollutants). In the near future, it is planned that the database will be perceived as an integrated system for national air emission management (and the emission data from all sources will be required to pay a “tax for the use of the environment”, which will be regulated by national Polish law). This paper is a part of the work related to the analysis of reported emission data. Additional research on the data collected in the national database might be used to develop a National Emission Inventory, in addition to evolution of country-specific emission factors (e.g. from combustion and industrial processes). The analysed data (emission of NOX, CO, SOX and TSP) were taken from the data for point sources submitted for 2011 primarily with the aim of improving the quality of data submitted previously - for 2010. This paper is the first study in the research to investigate outliers among the reported data using some basic statistical methods. Streszczenie „Krajowa baza o emisjach gazów cieplarnianych i innych substancji’’ (zw. dalej „Krajową bazą”), powstała pod koniec 2010 roku ma docelowo stanowić zintegrowany, polski system zbierania informacji o emisjach gazów cieplarnianych i innych substancji na potrzeby zarządzania emisjami gazów cieplarnianych i zanieczyszczeń powietrza na szczeblu krajowym. Dane o emisjach pochodzące z Krajowej bazy sprzyjają rozwojowi metodyki krajowej w zakresie zarówno inwentaryzacji emisji zanieczyszczeń powietrza (włączenie emisji pochodzącej ze źródeł punktowych - dane indywidualne) jak i opracowania krajowych wskaźników emisji (ang. country specific). Dane za rok 2010 obejmowały podmioty posiadające jedno z właściwych pozwoleń: pozwolenie zintegrowane albo pozwolenie na wprowadzanie gazów i pyłów do powietrza. Docelowo w Krajowej bazie mają być zawarte dane o emisjach ze wszystkich podmiotów wprowadzających opłaty za korzystanie ze środowiska. Niniejszy artykuł ma stanowić wstęp do pracy poświęconej analizie danych (o emisjach zanieczyszczeń powietrza), które pochodzą z Krajowej bazy (emisje of NOX, CO, SOX oraz TSP). Do analizy wstępnej wybrano dane za rok 2011 przede wszystkim w aspekcie poprawy jakości raportowania w stosunku do roku 2010. W pierwszym kroku prowadzenia analizy opracowanie poświęcono analizie wartości odstających (ang. outliers) z wykorzystaniem podstawowych technik statystycznych.