Monitoring the 1997 flood in the Red River Valley using hydrologic regimes and RADARSAT imagery

In this study, we attempt to relate hydrologic regimes of the 1997 flood in the Red River Valley to the areal extent of flooding, determined from RADARSAT imagery. We obtained ten scenes of RADARSAT imagery, from 27 April to 1 July, including bitmaps delineating flooded areas for each date, from the Manitoba Centre of Remote Sensing. These images were co-registered using an image-to-image registration process. By overlaying these flood maps in chronological order, we compared the areal extent of flooding with the hydrologic regimes of the Red River, expressed as relative depths of flooding above the bankful stage at selected gauging stations. The results of the study indicated that the area of flooding on 4 May (1,984 km ² ) corresponded well with the highest flood levels at several gauging stations. A previous scene on 27 April showed a larger area under water, but visual inspection of the processed imagery indicated a lack of conformity between flood level regimes and the areal extent of flooding on this date due to surface detention of pre-flood storm runoff. Thus, the RADARSAT imagery represented the flood regimes adequately only when its interpretations were combined with hydrologic analysis and visual inspection of surface characteristics of the floodplain.     

The Soviet Union and the Construction of Azerbaijani National Identity in the 1930s

Although the titular nation of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was Turkic speaking and had strong cultural and historical ties with Iran, the Soviet regime constructed a national identity that was divorced from its Turkic and Iranian past. The current literature cannot provide the exact period when this construction was put forward and generally argues that the Azerbaijani identity was artificially created as part of a broader “divide-and-rule” policy that was applied to all the Turkic nations in the Soviet Union. However, this thesis by itself does not explain why this change from a Turkic identity to an Azerbaijani one happened seventeen years after the Bolsheviks assumed power in Baku, and its simple causation makes it sound more like a conspiracy theory, which had a certain popularity in the Cold War era, than a scholarly argument. By presenting a broader view, the paper explains why and when the national identity in Soviet Azerbaijan was altered from Turkic to Azerbaijani. It argues that there were many factors that induced the Bolsheviks to take this extraordinary step in 1937. In fact, the change in defining national identity in Azerbaijan was a result of a combination of developments in the 1930s in Turkey, Iran, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The article concludes that these developments left Soviet rulers no choice but to construct an independent Azerbaijani identity.     

Two Early Archaic Shipwrecks at Kekova Adası and Kepçe Burnu,Turkey

During its annual surveys of the Turkish coast in the 1970s and 1980s, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology discovered two early Archaic (7th‐ to early‐6th‐century BC) shipwrecks at Kekova Adas? (Antalya region) and Kepçe Burnu (Mu?la region); Dokuz Eylül University's Institute of Marine Science and Technology is currently involved in survey of the region. The wrecks, marked by a primary cargo of basket‐handle amphoras, indicate exchange between Cyprus and the cities of coastal Asia Minor and Corinth. Such Iron Age internationalism may have been driven by an interest in processed agricultural goods such as olive oil. © 2010 The Authors