Publications

The Great Basin is an arid province located in the interior western United States. The region encompasses millions of hectares and quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) forests comprise a minor portion of the total area. However, montane aspen forests play a disproportionately large role in providing ecosystem services in the region, including water retention, biodiversity, wildlife...

Quantifying carbon fluxes into and out of coastal soils is critical to meeting greenhouse gas reduction and coastal resiliency goals. Numerous ‘blue carbon’ studies have generated, or benefitted from, synthetic datasets. However, the community those efforts inspired does not have a centralized, standardized database of disaggregated data used to estimate carbon stocks and fluxes. In this...

We train five models using two machine learning (ML) regression algorithms (i.e., linear regression and XGBoost) to predict hydrothermal upflow in the Great Basin. Feature data are extracted from datasets supporting the INnovative Geothermal Exploration through Novel Investigations Of Undiscovered Systems project (INGENIOUS). The label data (the reported convective signals) are extracted...

Recent advances in machine learning (ML) identifying areas favorable to hydrothermal systems indicate that the resolution of feature data remains a subject of necessary improvement before ML can reliably produce better models. Herein, we consider the value of adding new features or replacing other, low-value features with new input features in existing ML pipelines. Our previous work...

Selecting negative training sites is an important challenge to resolve when utilizing machine learning (ML) for predicting hydrothermal resource favorability because ideal models would discriminate between hydrothermal systems (positives) and all types of locations without hydrothermal systems (negatives). The Nevada Machine Learning project (NVML) fit an artificial neural network to...

The Harrat Rahat volcanic field, located in the west-central part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is one of the larger Cenozoic harrats among the more than 17 harrats situated upon the Arabia Plate. The map plate contained herein shows, at a scale of 1:100,000, the mapped volcanic geology of northern Harrat Rahat, which consists of the northernmost one-fifth of Harrat Rahat. Northern...

We present a probabilistic seismic-hazard analysis (PSHA) for the west-central part of the Arabian Peninsula. Our study area includes the northern Harrat Rahat volcanic field and the nearby city of Al Madīnah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This young, active volcanic field experienced one historical eruption in 1256 C.E. (654 in the year of the Hijra) that vented 20 to 22 kilometers (km)...

Earthquake swarms caused by volcanic activity, tectonic stresses, or industrial operations (oil and gas production) can pose considerable risk for nearby settlements. As a rule, a probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) that is based on time-independent earthquakes does not take into account earthquake swarms because of their statistically time-dependent nature. We describe the...

Ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs) for the western Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are developed by employing a mixed-effects regression model to modify the Boore and others (2014) Next Generation Attenuation-West2 (NGA-West2) project GMPEs. NGA-West2 addressed several key issues concerning GMPEs for shallow crustal earthquakes in active tectonic regions. However, the NGA-West2 input...

Harrat Rahat is a Cenozoic volcanic field in the west-central part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 150 kilometers east of the Red Sea, and is the site of the most recent eruption in the country (1256 C.E.; 654 in the year of the Hijra). The city of Al Madīnah lies at the north end of Harrat Rahat, and its volcanic and seismic risks are frequently reassessed. In 2009 C.E. an earthquake...

As part of a joint Saudi Geological Survey (SGS) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) project, we analyzed P-wave receiver functions from seismic stations covering most of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to map the thickness of the crust across the Arabia Plate. We present an update of crustal-thickness estimates and fill in gaps for the western Arabian Shield and the rifted margin at the Red...

Volcanism within the harrats (Arabic for “volcanic field”) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia includes at least one historical eruption occurring close to the holy city of Al Madīnah in 1256 C.E. As part of a volcanic- and seismic-hazard assessment of northern Harrat Rahat, magnetotelluric (MT) data were collected to investigate the structural setting of the area, the presence or absence of...