Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Co-constructing ‘third spaces’ for engagement between minoritized community groups and environmental scientists
Published: 2024-02-27
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The demographics of environmental and Earth scientists are not representative of the UK’s multicultural society. We sought to widen diversity through two related engaged research projects, 'Walking the Walk' and 'Landscape Stories'. This paper offers a critically reflexive account, based on the methodology of duoethnography, of how we co-constructed a ‘third space’ for these projects. We sought [...]
GLAMOUR: GLobAl building MOrphology dataset for URban hydroclimate modelling
Published: 2024-02-25
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding building morphology is crucial for accurately simulating interactions between urban structures and hydroclimate dynamics. Despite significant efforts to generate detailed global building morphology datasets, there is a lack of practical solutions using publicly accessible resources. In this work, we present GLAMOUR, a dataset derived from open-source Sentinel imagery that captures [...]
Deciphering the role of evapotranspiration in declining relative humidity trends over land
Published: 2024-02-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In recent decades, relative humidity (RH) over land has declined, driving increases in droughts and wildfires. Previous explanations attribute this trend to insufficient moisture advection from the ocean to sustain RH over land, but this ignores atmospheric moisture supplied from terrestrial evapotranspiration (E). While state-of-the-art climate models underestimate this RH trend, the reason [...]
Wave Scattering by an Isolated Cyclogeostrophic Vortex
Published: 2024-02-23
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The propagation paths of oceanic internal tides are influenced by their interactions with vortices. We examine the scattering effect that an isolated vortex in (cyclo)geostrophic balance has on a rotating shallow-water plane wave. We run a suite of simulations in which we vary the non-dimensional vorticity of the vortex, Ro, the relative scale of the vortex size to the Rossby radius of [...]
The effects of precursory velocity changes on earthquake nucleation and stress evolution in dynamic earthquake cycle simulations
Published: 2024-02-21
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seismic velocity changes in earthquake cycles have been observed over a wide range of timescales and may be a good indicator of the onset of future earthquakes. Understanding the effects of precursory velocity changes right before seismic and slow-slip events could potentially elucidate the onset and timing of fault failure. We use numerical models to simulate fully dynamic earthquake cycles in [...]
The Potential for Fuel Reduction to Offset Climate Warming Impacts on Wildfire Intensity in California
Published: 2024-02-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Increasing fuel aridity due to climate warming has and will continue to increase wildfire danger in California. In addition to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, one of the primary proposals for counteracting this increase in wildfire danger is a widespread expansion of hazardous fuel reductions. Here, we quantify the potential for fuel reduction to reduce wildfire intensity using [...]
Abundance and type of microplastics along an urban density gradient in the Allander Water and River Kelvin, Greater Glasgow, Scotland
Published: 2024-02-20
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Microplastics have now been found in air, water, and soil, polluting a wide range of environments globally and presenting potential health threats to humans and other organisms. This study aimed to investigate the type and abundance of microplastics in two urban rivers in Glasgow, Scotland. Here we sampled sediments from the more suburban Allander Water and an urban reach of the River Kelvin, [...]
Decoding the Dialogue Between Clouds and Land
Published: 2024-02-18
Subjects: Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
New research is challenging established assumptions about how clouds form and interact with Earth’s surface. One result may be better weather forecasts.
The role of crustal anatexis in porphyry copper ore formation during flat-slab subduction: Insights from the Laramide Belt, SW USA
Published: 2024-02-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The prevailing paradigm for the formation of porphyry copper deposits along convergent plate boundaries involves deep-crustal differentiation of metal-bearing juvenile magmas derived from the mantle-wedge above a subduction zone. However, many major porphyry districts formed during periods of flat-slab subduction when the mantle-wedge would have been reduced or absent, leaving unclear the source [...]
Temporal Comparisons Involving Paleoclimate Data Assimilation: Challenges and Remedies
Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Paleoclimate reconstructions are increasingly central to climate assessments, placing recent and future variability in a broader historical context. Paleoclimate reconstructions are increasingly central to climate assessments, placing recent and future variability in a broader historical context. Several estimation methods produce plumes of climate trajectories that practitioners often want to [...]
WaterGate: An Accessible Computational Model of Flooding Patterns
Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
240 million people are affected by floods each year, reflecting the urgent need for accessible flood prediction and detection. WaterGate is a computational model that uses geographic elevation data and the rational method to predict flooding patterns , generating an interactive 3D model for user accessibility. Computational hydrology applies numerical methods, machine learning algorithms, and [...]
Mechanisms and seismological signatures of rupture complexity induced by fault damage zones in fully-dynamic earthquake cycle models
Published: 2024-02-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Damage zones are common around faults, but their effects on earthquake mechanics are still incompletely understood. Here, we investigate how damage affects rupture patterns, source time functions and ground motions in 2D fully-dynamic cycle models. We find that back-propagating rupture fronts emerge in large faults and can be triggered by residual stresses left by previous ruptures or by [...]
Magma solidification effects during sill emplacement: insights from laboratory experiments
Published: 2024-02-09
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Igneous sills and interconnected sill complexes transport magma both vertically through the Earth’s crust and laterally over potentially long distances. Although cooling and solidification of magma are acknowledged to play a major role in the propagation and emplacement of sills, their contributions to sill formation remain poorly understood. Here, the effects of solidification on sill [...]
DAS to Discharge: Using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to infer glacier runoff
Published: 2024-02-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Observations of glacier melt and runoff are of fundamental interest in the study of glaciers and their interactions with their environment. Considerable recent interest has developed around distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), a sensing technique which utilizes Rayleigh backscatter in fiber optic cables to measure the seismo-acoustic wavefield in high spatial and temporal resolution. Here, we [...]
Azimuthal Variation in the Spectra of the 2019 Ridgecrest Earthquake Clusters and its Application to Understanding Fault Zone Structure
Published: 2024-02-08
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We first show through dynamic rupture models that FDZs can amplify high-frequency waves along directions close to fault strike and the amplified frequency band may be used to estimate the width and velocity contrast of the FDZ. Then, we identify this high-frequency amplification in the spectra of M1.5–3 earthquakes from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence. We cluster the earthquakes by [...]