Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A Spatially Explicit Satellite-Derived Surface Urban Heat Island Database for Urbanized Areas in the United States: Characterization, Uncertainties, and Possible Applications
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The urban heat island (UHI) effect is strongly modulated by urban-scale changes to the aerodynamic, thermal, and radiative properties of the Earth’s land surfaces. Interest in this phenomenon, both from the climatological and public health perspectives, has led to hundreds of UHI studies, mostly conducted on a city-by-city basis. These studies, however, do not provide a complete picture of the [...]
The mechanism of Mg diffusion in forsterite and the controls on its anisotropy
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Mineral Physics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mg diffusion is important for explaining many rheological properties in forsterite but its mechanism is unknown. Without knowing a mechanism the effect of variables such as pressure are hard to constrain. In this study we used Density Functional Theory (DFT) to calculate the diffusivity of Mg vacancies and interstitials in forsterite and thus the diffusion rate of Mg in forsterite. We predict [...]
Early evidence that COVID-19 government policies reduce urban air pollution
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Governments have a solemn responsibility to ensure the health and well-being of the populations they govern. The COVID-19 pandemic reveals just how serious governments take this responsibility and that restricting activity to limit pathogen spread can have other public health repercussions. Comparisons between February 2019 and 2020 air quality measures reveal that six cities that were impacted [...]
A New Synergistic Approach for Monitoring Wetlands Using 1 Sentinels -1 and 2 data With Object-based Machine Learning 2 Algorithms
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In this work the synergistic use of Sentinel-1 and 2 combined with the System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses (SAGA) Wetness Index in the content of land use/cover (LULC) mapping with emphasis in wetlands is evaluated. A further objectivehas been to a new Object-based Image Analysis (OBIA) approach for mapping wetland areas using Sentinel-1 and 2 data, where the latter is also tested [...]
Shallow-water mudstone architecture and depositional process variability: evidence for heterogeneity at kilometre-scale
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Mudstone studies that use a large spacing (>5km) between datapoints provide little insight into the architecture and depositional process variability at kilometre scale. This often leads to the assumption that mudstones are laterally homogenous at kilometre and sub-kilometre scales. To better understand the lateral variability of mudstones at kilometre scale, the Mancos Shale in the eastern [...]
RainDisaggGAN - Temporal Disaggregation of Spatial Rainfall Fields with Generative Adversarial Networks
Published: 2020-03-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Creating spatially coherent rainfall patterns with high temporal resolution from data with lower temporal resolution is an important topic in many geoscientific applications. From a statistical perspective, this presents a high-dimensional and highly under-determined problem. However, recent advances in unsupervised machine learning provide methods for learning such high-dimensional probability [...]
Saturation excess overland flow accelerates the spread of a generalist soil-borne pathogen
Published: 2020-03-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Plant pathogens are a major agent of disturbance in ecosystems worldwide. Disturbance by disease can alter the hydrological function of affected ecosystems. However, many plant pathogens are also sensitive to soil moisture and can be propagated by the transport of infectious tissue or reproductive structures in surface flow, so that hydrological processes can drive pathogen infection. These [...]
Streamflow depletion estimation for conjunctive water management in a heavily-stressed aquifer using analytical depletion functions
Published: 2020-03-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Groundwater pumping can lead to reductions in streamflow (‘streamflow depletion’) and estimating streamflow depletion is critical for conjunctive groundwater-surface water management. Streamflow depletion can be quantified using either analytical models, which have low data requirements but many simplifying assumptions, or numerical models, which represent physical processes more realistically [...]
Seismic expression, structure and evolution of flow cells within a mass-transport complex
Published: 2020-03-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Mass flows evolve longitudinally during emplacement, but they can also vary laterally by forming discrete, shear zone-bound intraflow cells with different rheological states. Despite being documented in several field and subsurface studies, the controls on the initiation, translation, and cessation of these flow cells remain unclear. We here use five, high-quality post-stack time-migrated (PSTM) [...]
Unexpected meteotsunamis prior to the Typhoon Wipha
Published: 2020-03-23
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
On October 15, 2013, unexpected meteotsunamis occurred prior to Typhoon Wipha located the distance of ~1,100 km from the center of the cyclone to the Tokyo bay. The occurrences were observed around the east coast of Japan coincidentally with atmospheric pressure disturbances induced by this typhoon. The observed wave height of meteotsunamis was up to ~0.5 m with the pressure fluctuation of ~2 hPa [...]
Against Steady State
Published: 2020-03-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Nature is never at a steady state. Natural history is generated by ever-new and ever-interacting forces that produce continuous changes. At virtually all timescales, the geological record shows that these changes do not cancel each other out and, thus, that the steady state is utopic. However, we need a state of equilibrium as a starting point for modelling Nature, and the steady-state condition [...]
Toward stable, general machine-learned models of the atmospheric chemical system
Published: 2020-03-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Atmospheric chemistry models—used as components in models that simulate air pollution and climate change—are computationally expensive. Previous studies have shown that machine-learned atmospheric chemical solvers can be orders of magnitude faster than traditional integration methods but tend to suffer from numerical instability. Here, we present a modeling framework that reduces error [...]
Evaluating the capabilities of optical/TIR imagine sensing systems for quantifying soil water content
Published: 2020-03-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) is a key parameter of the global energy and water cycle and knowing its spatio-temporal variability is of key importance in an array of research topics and in several practical applications alike. Recent developments in Earth Observation (EO) have indicated that SSM can be retrieved from different regions of electromagnetic spectrum and numerous approaches have been [...]
INTERACTIONS OF DEEP-WATER GRAVITY FLOWS AND ACTIVE SALT TECTONICS
Published: 2020-03-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Sediment gravity flow behaviour is influenced by seafloor topography associated with salt structures, which controls the depositional architecture of deep-water sedimentary systems. Typically, salt-influenced deep-water successions are poorly-imaged in seismic reflection data and exhumed systems are rare, hence the detailed sedimentology and stratigraphic architecture of these systems remains [...]
Rapid Tidal Marsh Development in Anthropogenic Backwaters
Published: 2020-03-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Tidal marsh restoration and creation has been proposed as a tool to build coastal resilience in the face of rising sea level and increasing intensity of coastal storms. However, it is unclear what conditions within constructed settings will lead to the successful establishment of tidal marsh. We used sediment cores and historical geospatial data in the tidal freshwater Hudson River to identify [...]