Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
A 40-Year Remote Sensing Analysis of Spatiotemporal Temperature and Rainfall Patterns in Senegal
Published: 2024-08-31
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Climate change impacts manifest differently worldwide, with many African countries, including Senegal, being particularly vulnerable. The decline in ground observations and limited access to these observations continue to impede research efforts to understand, plan, and mitigate the current and future impacts of climate change. This occurs at a time of rapid growth in Earth observations (EO) [...]
Linking drought indicators and crop yields through causality and information transfer: a phenology-based analysis
Published: 2024-08-29
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Drought indicators, which are quantitative measurements of drought severity and duration, are used to monitor and predict the risk and effects of drought, particularly in relation to the sustainability of agriculture and water supplies. This research uses causal inference and information theory to discover the drought index, which is the most efficient indicator for agricultural productivity and [...]
The extended Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset: Extending the GLCP to include ice, snow, and radiation-related climate variables
Published: 2024-08-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
A changing climate and increasing human population necessitate understanding global freshwater availability. To enable assessment of lake water variability from local-to-global and monthly-to-decadal scales, we extended the Global Lake area, Climate, and Population (GLCP) dataset, which contains monthly lake surface area for 1.42 million lakes with paired basin-level climate and population data [...]
Interactions Between Human Activities and Natural Processes Shape Specific Conductance and Ion Composition of United States Lakes
Published: 2024-08-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Specific conductance (SC) and major ions are important water quality constituents and key indicators of freshwater salinization. Being relatively conservative and less influenced by biological activity, they integrate hydrologic, climatic, and anthropogenic influences, allowing us to track and understand lake responses to global change. However, the patterns and drivers of macroscale (regional to [...]
Novel landforms: integrating people as key drivers of process and form in geomorphology
Published: 2024-08-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology
People alter the earth’s surface in diverse and prolific ways, from enhancing physical and chemical erosion to controlling water transport across drainage networks. These modifications are often faster, more extensive, and wholly novel when compared to natural landscape evolutionary processes. Existing literature largely portrays people as independent of a landscape’s geologic and climatic [...]
The influence of wildfire smoke on ambient chemical species concentrations in the contiguous US
Published: 2024-08-15
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Wildfires are a significant contributor to ambient air pollution and pose a growing public health threat in many parts of the world. Increased wildfire activity over the past few decades has exacerbated smoke exposure across the US, yet our understanding of how wildfire influences specific chemicals and their resulting concentration in smoke remains incomplete. We combine 15 years of daily [...]
A methodologically robust densification function for snow on multiyear Arctic sea ice
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Intercomparison of satellite derived SST with logger data in the Caribbean – Implications for coral reef monitoring
Published: 2024-08-06
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Since the early 1980s measurements of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) derived from satellite-borne instruments have provided a wide range of global gridded products documenting changes in SST. However, there are many sources of uncertainty in these records and significant differences exist among them. One use of these products is identification of coral bleaching events, and the predictions of the [...]
Harmful Algal Bloom Prediction using Empirical Dynamic Modelling
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) can originate from a variety of reasons, including water pollution coming from agriculture, effluent from treatment plants, sewage system leaks, pH and light levels, and the consequences of climate change. In recent years, HAB events have become a serious environmental problem, paralleling population growth, agricultural development, increasing air temperatures, and [...]
Towards automatic delineation of landslide source and runout
Published: 2024-07-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Mathematics
Mapping landslide-depleted source areas is pivotal for refining predictive models and volume estimations, yet these critical regions are often conflated with the landslide runouts, leading to sub-optimal assessments. The source areas are typically the regions where the actual failure occurs, providing crucial information on the initiation mechanisms and the nature of landslide propagation. [...]
Relating Multi-Scale Plume Detection and Area Estimates of Methane Emissions: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Methodologies for inferring surface emissions of atmospheric trace gases can be categorized into plume detection and area-scale estimation. Plume detections are observations of emissions from either individual or clustered point sources. Area estimates are derived from top-down atmospheric flux inversion models or bottom-up inventories, which infer mean emissions typically over spatial scales [...]
TROPICAL STORM SURGE: FORMATION, IMPACT, AND RECENT ADVANCES IN ITS PREDICTION TOWARDS DEVELOPING MITIGATION STRATEGIES
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Planetary Sciences
Tropical storm surge poses significant risks to coastal areas, necessitating precise prediction for effective emergency preparedness and mitigation. Recent advances in numerical models such as SLOSH, ADCIRC, and FVCOM have revolutionized storm surge forecasting by accurately simulating complex hydrodynamic processes, bolstered by ADCIRC's use of high-resolution grids and parallel computing for [...]
Equality, diversity and inclusion recommendations and best practice from NERC Doctoral Training Partnerships & Centers for Doctoral Training: DEI Forum Report 2023
Published: 2024-07-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Higher Education
This report represents the collective voice of NERC DTPs & CDTs, demonstrating the reality of nurturing Diversity, Equality and Inclusion at the ground level from the perspectives of staff and students. Individually, we have faced common barriers towards improving DEI within our host universities and honed our expertise in realising DEI through extensive research and [...]
Satellite survey sheds new light on global solid waste methane emissions
Published: 2024-07-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Anthropogenic methane emissions are the second most important contributor to climate change, and their rapid reductions could help decrease near-term warming. Solid waste emits methane through the decay of organic material, which amounts to about 10% of total anthropogenic methane emissions. Satellite instruments enable monitoring of strong methane hotspots, including many strongly emitting urban [...]
Micro-Scale Mapping of Soil Organic Carbon: The Potential of Soft X-Ray Spectromicroscopy
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Sciences, Soil Science
Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a crucial role in soil fertility, productivity, and global carbon cycling. However, the mechanisms governing SOC persistence and turnover are not fully understood, hindering effective carbon management strategies. Especially limiting are challenges to visualize and characterize spatial distribution patterns of SOC within the intact soil. This study presents a novel [...]