ALBERT

Description: IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 50: Estimating the Excess Mortality Risk during Two Red Alert Periods in Beijing, China International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph15010050 Authors: Weilin Zeng Lingling Lang Yue Li Lingchuan Guo Hualiang Lin Yonghui Zhang Tao Liu Jianpeng Xiao Xing Li Yanjun Xu Xiaojun Xu Lauren Arnold Erik Nelson Zhengmin Qian Wenjun Ma The magnitude of excess mortality risk due to exposures to heavy air pollution during the red alert periods in Beijing remains unknown. A health impact assessment tool combined with the PM2.5-mortality relationship was applied to estimate the number of excess deaths due to high air pollution exposure during two red alert periods in Beijing, China in December 2015. Daily PM2.5 concentration increased from 80.2 µg/m3 to 159.8 µg/m3 during the first red alert period and from 61.9 µg/m3 to 226 µg/m3 during the second period in 2015 when compared to daily PM2.5 concentrations during the same calendar date of 2013 and 2014. It was estimated that 26 to 42 excessive deaths (including 14 to 34 cardiovascular deaths, and four to 16 respiratory deaths) occurred during the first period, and 40 to 65 excessive deaths (22 to 53 cardiovascular deaths, and six to 13 respiratory deaths) occurred during the second period. The results show that heavy smog may have substantially increased the mortality risk in Beijing, suggesting more stringent air pollution controlling measures should be implemented to protect the public health.

Description: Atmosphere, Vol. 9, Pages 280: Analysis of Compositional Variation and Source Characteristics of Water-Soluble Ions in PM2.5 during Several Winter-Haze Pollution Episodes in Shenyang, China Atmosphere doi: 10.3390/atmos9070280 Authors: Ye Hong Chaoliu Li Xiaolan Li Yanjun Ma Yunhai Zhang Deping Zhou Yangfeng Wang Ningwei Liu Xiaojiao Chang From 18 February to 13 March 2014 and from 17 December 2016 to 27 January 2017, an online analyzer for monitoring aerosols and gases (MARGA) and an online single particle aerosol mass spectrometer (SPAMS) were used to measure and analyze the concentrations and sources of water-soluble (WS) ions in PM10, PM2.5, and gases (NH3, HNO3, HCl), in Shenyang City, China. During the field campaign, nine haze episodes (or smog episodes, total 582 h) were identified, with 960 identified as non-haze periods. The average mass concentrations of PM2.5 and total water-soluble ions (TWSIs) in PM2.5 during haze episodes were 131 μg·m−3 and 77.2 μg·m−3, 2.3 times and 1.9 times the values in non-haze periods, respectively. The average mass concentration of TWSIs in PM2.5 was 55.9 μg·m−3 (accounting for 55.9% of PM2.5 mass loading), 37.6% of which was sulfate, 31.7% nitrate, 20.0% ammonium, 6.6% chloride, 1.9% potassium, 1.4% calcium, and 0.8% magnesium throughout the campaign. Concentrations of sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium (SNA) secondary pollution ions increased rapidly during haze episodes to as much as 2.2 times, 3.0 times, and 2.4 times higher than during non-haze periods, respectively. Diurnal variations during non-haze periods were significant, while complex pollution was insignificant. Based on changes in the backward trajectories and concentrations of WS ions, the hazy episodes were divided into three types: complex, coal-burning, and automobile exhaust pollution. All complex episodes had high concentrations and greater contributions of ammonium nitrate from complex and automobile exhaust pollution, while the contribution of ammonium sulfate from coal-burning pollution was greater than that of ammonium nitrate. The correlation coefficients among SNA species were very high in complex pollution, with nitrate and sulfate the main forms present. The results of principal component analysis (PCA) were related to emissions from burning coal for heating and from long-range transmission in winter. In the case of exhaust pollution, NO3− accounted for the highest percentage of PM2.5, and NH4+ was more closely related to NO3− than to SO42−. Coal-burning pollution was the most common type of pollution in Shenyang. The contribution of sulfate was higher than that of nitrate. Based on PCA, the contribution of coal-burning emissions varied from 36.7% to 53.6% due to industry, soil sources, and other factors.

Description: Casing coupling location signals provided by the magnetic localizer in retractors are typically used to ascertain the position of casing couplings in horizontal wells. However, the casing coupling location signal is usually submerged in noise, which will result in the failure of casing coupling detection under the harsh logging environment conditions. The limitation of Shannon wavelet time entropy, in the feature extraction of casing status, is presented by analyzing its application mechanism, and a corresponding improved algorithm is subsequently proposed. On the basis of wavelet transform, two derivative algorithms, singular values decomposition and Tsallis entropy theory, are proposed and their physics meanings are researched. Meanwhile, a novel data mining approach to extract casing status features with Tsallis wavelet singularity entropy is put forward in this paper. The theoretical analysis and experiment results indicate that the proposed approach can not only extract the casing coupling features accurately, but also identify the characteristics of perforation and local corrosion in casings. The innovation of the paper is in the use of simple wavelet entropy algorithms to extract the complex nonlinear logging signal features of a horizontal well tractor.