Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
From ground motion simulations to landslide occurrence prediction
Published: 2023-01-17
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Ground motion simulations solve wave equations in space and time, thus producing detailed estimates of the shaking time series. This is essentially uncharted territory for geomorphologists, for we have yet to understand which ground motion (synthetic or not) parameter, or combination of parameters, is more suitable to explain the coseismic landslide distribution. To address this gap, we developed [...]
A global apparent polar wander path for the last 320 Ma calculated from site-level paleomagnetic data
Published: 2023-01-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Apparent polar wander paths (APWPs) calculated from paleomagnetic data describe the motion of tectonic plates relative to the Earth’s rotation axis through geological time, providing a quantitative paleogeographic framework for studying the evolution of Earth’s interior, surface, and atmosphere. Previous APWPs were typically calculated from collections of paleomagnetic poles, with each pole [...]
How fine is fine enough? Effect of mesh resolution on hydrodynamic simulations in coral reef environments
Published: 2023-01-14
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Coral reef environments are biodiversity hotspots that provide many services to coastal communities. They are currently facing an increasing anthropogenic pressure that jeopardises their survival. Numerical ocean models are an important tool to understand the functioning of coral ecosystems and the mechanisms ensuring their resilience. However, simulating the water circulation through reef [...]
The upper mantle geoid for lithospheric structure and dynamics
Published: 2023-01-14
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Geoid anomalies offer crucial information on the internal density structure of the Earth, and thus, on its constitution and dynamic state. In order to interpret geoid undulations in terms of depth, magnitude and lateral extension of density anomalies in the lithosphere and upper mantle, the effects of lower mantle density anomalies need to be removed from the full geoid (thus obtaining a residual [...]
Consumer-grade UAV solid-state LiDAR accurately quantifies topography in a vegetated fluvial environment
Published: 2023-01-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Unoccupied Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with passive optical sensors have become popular for reconstructing topography using Structure from Motion photogrammetry (SfM). Advances in UAV payloads and the advent of solid-state LiDAR have enabled consumer-grade active remote sensing equipment to become more widely available, potentially providing opportunities to overcome some challenges associated with [...]
Residual U-Net with Attention for Detecting Clouds in Satellite Imagery
Published: 2023-01-13
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Semantic segmentation of clouds in Earth observation imagery is an important task in a variety of remote sensing contexts: from the application of atmospheric corrections to being able to accurately omit cloud pixels when extracting information about ground features. Here we introduce a deep learning approach based on the popular U-Net architecture. The core of the architecture is an U-Net with [...]
Mixtures of sediment chemical contaminants at freshwater sampling sites across Europe with different contaminant burdens
Published: 2023-01-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Extended chemical analyses of fluvial sediments was undertaken to establish the key pollutant pressures and mixtures present across nine European Union inland waterways. A wide range of chemical components and physical parameters were investigated including substances from the EU Priority List and Watch List. The data set was examined for key indicator compounds, however it was found that a wide [...]
Non-perennial stream networks as directed acyclic graphs: The R-package streamDAG
Published: 2023-01-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Many conventional stream network metrics are time-invariant and/or do not consider the importance of individual stream locations to network functionality. As a result, they are not well-suited to non-perennial streams, in which hydrologic status (flowing vs. pooled vs. dry) can vary substantially in space and time. To help address this issue, we consider non-perennial streams as directed acyclic [...]
The Communication Distance of Non-Perennial Streams
Published: 2023-01-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We developed Bayesian statistical approaches to assess non-perennial stream network connectivity. Our new methods allow: 1) consideration of changes to both local (stream segment) and global (stream network) connectivity over time, 2) incorporation of prior information from different data sources, and 3) straightforward computation of the posterior distributions of both active stream length and a [...]
Identifying the regional emergence of climate patterns in the ARISE-SAI-1.5 simulations
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed form of solar climate invention (SCI) that could potentially reduce the amount of future warming from externally-forced climate change. However, more research is needed, as there are significant uncertainties surrounding the possible impacts of SCI, including unforeseen effects on regional climate patterns. In this study, we consider a climate model [...]
Drought impacts on the electricity system, emissions, and air quality in the western US
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The western United States has experienced severe drought in recent decades, and climate models project increased drought risk in the future. This increased drying could have important implications for the region's interconnected, hydropower-dependent electricity systems. Using power-plant level generation and emissions data from 2001-2021, we quantify the impacts of drought on the operation of [...]
Constraining the complex refractive index of black carbon particles using the complex forward-scattering amplitude
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Black carbon is the largest contributor to global aerosol’s shortwave absorption in the current atmosphere and is an important positive climate forcer. The complex refractive index, m = mr + imi, the primary determinant of the absorbed and scattered energies of incident radiation per unit volume of particulate material, has not been accurately known for atmospheric black carbon material. An [...]
Oracle bone script records explain the impact of climate extremes in ancient China
Published: 2023-01-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Extreme climatic and weather events have raised increasing concerns in the context of climate change for causing severe disasters worldwide. As for ancient civilizations, however, possible causes of extreme events and their corresponding cultural responses have remained unclear. By quantitatively analyzing the weather information in ~55000 oracle bone script pieces, we constructed three ~200-year [...]
Assessing automated gap imputation of regional scale groundwater level data sets with typical gap patterns
Published: 2023-01-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Large groundwater level (GWL) data sets are often patchy with hydrographs containing continuous gaps and irregular measurement frequencies. However, most statistical time series analyses require regular observations, thus hydrographs with larger gaps are routinely excluded from further analysis despite the loss of coverage and representativity of an initially large data set. Missing values can be [...]
Refining the Moho across the Australian continent
Published: 2023-01-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In recent years there has been a considerable expansion of deployments of portable seismic stations across Australia, which have been analysed by receiver function or autocorrelation methods to extract estimates of Moho depth. An ongoing program of full-crustal reflection profiles has now provided more than 25,000 km of reflection transects that have been interpreted for Moho structure. The Moho [...]