Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Rano Kao & Ava Ranga Uka: Rapa Nui Report 2014
Published: 2023-10-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies
29 March 2014 Objective: Sampling and testing Rano Kao water depth, evaporation and volume. Compare with previous results from 2005, 2008 and 2014 coring expeditions and detect the rate of change in lake water evaporation as compared to Global Meteoric Water Line.
Spaceborne assessment of the Soviet Union's role in the 1990s methane slowdown
Published: 2023-10-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Methane is the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas, amounting to 60% of the radiative forcing from CO2 since pre-industrial times based on emitted compound. Global atmospheric methane concentrations rose by 10-15 ppb/yr in the 1980s before abruptly slowing to 2-8 ppb/yr in the early 1990s. This period in the 1990s is known as the ``methane slowdown'' and has been attributed to the [...]
Geological evidence confirms the staircase patterns of Earth’s rotation deceleration from the Neoproterozoic to the Mesozoic Era
Published: 2023-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Due to tidal dissipation, the Earth’s rotation has been slowing down, but the past rates of this process remain subject of debate. Here we conducted a comprehensive cyclostratigraphic analysis of eight geological datasets to further constrain the Earth's rotation history from the Neoproterozoic to Mesozoic. Our results allow us to further test theoretical physical tidal models, and support a [...]
Revisiting oxygen-18 and clumped isotopes in planktic and benthic foraminifera
Published: 2023-09-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Foraminiferal isotopes are widely used to study past oceans, with different species recording conditions at different depths. Their δ18O values record both seawater oxygen-18 and temperature according to species-specific fractionation factors, while their Δ47 signatures likely depend only on temperature. We describe an open-source framework to collect/combine data relevant to foraminiferal [...]
Accuracy of UAV mapping of Natura 2000 forest, wetland and grassland habitats: Do we need more seasons or more spectral bands?
Published: 2023-09-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Mapping and monitoring of Natura 2000 habitats (Habitat Directive 92/43/EEC) is one of the key activities to ensure the protection of natural habitats in Europe. Remote sensing can help to acquire high-quality maps of the distribution and conservation status of Natura 2000 habitats, for example through classifying multispectral data. However, due to the high number of habitats (classes) [...]
Catchment characterization: current descriptors, knowledge gaps and future opportunities
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
An ability to describe hydrologically relevant differences between places is at the core of our science. A common way to characterize hydrological catchments is to use descriptors that summarize important physical aspects of the system, often by aggregating heterogeneous geospatial data into a single number. Such descriptors aim to capture various facets of catchment functioning and structure, [...]
Shifting institutional culture to develop climate solutions with Open Science
Published: 2023-09-20
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Is the smoke aloft? Caveats regarding the use of the Hazard Mapping System (HMS) smoke product as a proxy for surface smoke presence across the United States
Published: 2023-09-14
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Background: NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System (HMS) smoke product comprises smoke plumes digitized from satellite imagery. Recent studies have used HMS as a proxy for surface smoke presence. Aims: We compare HMS to airport observations, air quality station measurements, and model estimates of near-surface smoke. Methods: We quantify the agreement in smoke days and trends, regional discrepancies in [...]
Using convex optimization to efficiently apportion tracer and pollutant sources from point concentration observations
Published: 2023-09-05
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics
Rivers transport elements, minerals, chemicals, and pollutants produced in their upstream basins. A sample from a river is a mixture of all of its upstream sources, making it challenging to pinpoint the contribution from each individual source. Here, we show how a nested sample design and convex optimization can be used to efficiently unmix downstream samples of a well-mixed, conservative tracer [...]
SeisMIC - an Open Source Python Toolset to Compute Velocity Changes from Ambient Seismic Noise
Published: 2023-09-01
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present SeisMIC, a fast, versatile, and adaptable open-source software to estimate seismic velocity changes from ambient seismic noise. SeisMIC includes a broad set of tools and functions to facilitate end-to-end processing of ambient noise data, from data retrieval and raw data analysis via spectrogram computation, over waveform coherence analysis, to post-processing of the final velocity [...]
Understanding Europe’s forest harvesting regimes
Published: 2023-09-01
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations
The functioning and structure of most European forests are actively shaped by intensive human use. Harvesting of wood is one of the key processes of forest management, making it a crucial element to include in any large-scale analysis of forest ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of how forests are harvested across Europe is limited, as the true harvest regimes – a realisation of decisions made by [...]
Why is it critical to revisit significance and consequences of salt precipitation during CO2 injection?
Published: 2023-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry
Among the candidates for CO2 sequestration, deep saline aquifers are considered the best option because of their storage capacity and proximity to emission sources. Injection of large volumes (million tons scale) of supercritical CO2 into the geological formations causes evaporation of formation water near wellbores and precipitation of salt crystals inside the porous medium. CO2-induced salt [...]
GossenAIA2015-RapaNuislides
Published: 2023-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A slide presentation from AIA 116th Annual Conference, New Orleans, Jan 8-11 2015. The 149 slides in pdf format are from the original Keynote presentation: Deforestation, Drought and Humans: The Collapse Theory is Dead-New Evidence of Sustainability and Survival.
imc-precip-iso: Open monthly stable isotope data of precipitation over the Indonesian Maritime Continent
Published: 2023-08-12
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Stable isotopes, $\delta^2$H, $\delta^{18}$O, and d-excess, are valuable tools as natural tracers of diffusion processes and phase changes in the global hydroclimatological cycle. The Indonesian Maritime Continent (IMC) is an archipelago area surrounded by very warm waters which induce convective activities as the primary heat source driving global atmospheric circulation. Given the central role [...]
M-band discrete wavelet transform–based deep learning algorithm for identifying thermokarst lakes in the QinghaiTibetan Plateau
Published: 2023-08-12
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Thermokarst lakes serve as key signs of permafrost thaw, and as point sources of CH4 in the present and near future. However, detailed information on the distribution of thermokarst lakes remains sparse across the entire permafrost region on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP). In this research, we developed a new discrete wavelet transform (DWT)–based dual-input deep learning (DL) model using a [...]