Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Evaluating Clean Water Act progress drivers for Idaho rivers and streams 2002-2022
Published: 2023-03-03
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
In the United States, the Clean Water Act (CWA) is the primary legislation driving surface water quality management. Its goal is to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” Section 305(b) of the CWA requires states to document CWA progress by reporting whether applicable water quality standards are achieved for all state waters every two [...]
Large variation in Mekong river plastic transport between wet and dry season
Published: 2023-02-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Plastic pollution in rivers is of increased global concern. Rivers act both as pathways for land-based plastic waste into the ocean, and as plastic reservoirs for long-term retention. Reliable observations are key to designing, optimizing and evaluating strategies to prevent and reduce plastic pollution. Several measurement methods have been developed to quantify macroplastic ($>$0.5 cm) storage [...]
Quantifying fire-specific smoke severity
Published: 2023-02-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rapidly changing wildfire regimes across the Western US has driven more frequent and severe wildfires, resulting in wide-ranging societal threats from the wildfires themselves and the smoke that they generate. However, common measures of fire severity focus on what is burned and do not account for the societal impacts of the smoke generated from each fire. We combine satellite-derived fire scars, [...]
Desiccation of ecosystem-critical microbialites in the shrinking Great Salt Lake, Utah (USA)
Published: 2023-02-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Great Salt Lake hosts an ecosystem that is critical to migratory birds and international aquaculture, yet it is currently threatened by falling lake elevation and high lakewater salinity resulting from water diversions in the upstream watershed and the enduring megadrought in the western United States. Microbialite reefs underpin the ecosystem, hosting a surface microbial community that is [...]
Under-ice and open-water ecosystem metabolism in temperate water bodies
Published: 2023-02-01
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Winter, historically a largely un-monitored season, is influential and changing. There is evidence of the importance of under-ice phytoplankton in temperate lakes, but it is currently unknown if high winter phytoplankton biomass translates to high productivity and what influence it has on year-round lake metabolism. Winters are getting shorter, but our ability to forecast change is hindered by [...]
Leaving a plastic legacy: current and future scenarios for mismanaged plastic waste in rivers
Published: 2023-01-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Mismanaged plastic waste (MPW) entering the riverine environment is concerning, given that most plastic pollution never reaches the oceans, and it has a severe negative impact on terrestrial ecosystems. However, significant knowledge gaps on the storage and remobilization of MPW within different rivers over varying timescales remain. Here we analyze the exposure of river systems to MPW to better [...]
Deforestation as an anthropogenic driver of mercury pollution
Published: 2023-01-24
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Deforestation reduces the capacity of the terrestrial biosphere to take up the toxic pollutant mercury (Hg) and enhances the release of secondary Hg from soils. The consequences of deforestation for Hg cycling are not currently considered by anthropogenic emissions inventories or specifically addressed under the global Minamata Convention on Mercury. Using global Hg modeling constrained by field [...]
EZ-InSAR: An Easy-to-use Open-source Toolbox for Mapping Ground Surface Deformation using Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Software Engineering
Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) is a space-borne geodetic technique that can map ground displacement at millimetre accuracy. Via the new era for InSAR applications provided by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR satellites, several open-source software packages exist for processing the SAR data, obtaining high- quality ground deformation maps but still requires a deep [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Analysis of nationwide groundwater monitoring networks using lumped-parameter models
Published: 2022-12-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering
Many countries maintain nationwide groundwater networks to monitor the status of their groundwater resources. For effective groundwater resource management, it is fundamental to understand the groundwater dynamics measured in the individual monitoring wells. Nationwide monitoring networks typically cover multiple aquifer systems with different degrees of environmental complexity. The analysis of [...]
Shortening ice seasons and changing phenology affect under-ice lake temperature dynamics
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Temperate lakes worldwide are losing ice cover but the implications for under-ice thermal dynamics are poorly constrained. Using a 92-year record of ice phenology from a temperate and historically dimictic lake, we examined trends, variability, and drivers of ice phenology and under-ice temperatures. The onset of ice formation decreased by 23 days century-1 which can be largely attributed to [...]
Citizen and Machine Learning-aided High-resolution mapping of urban heat exposure and stress
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Through conversion of land cover to more built-up, impervious surfaces, cities are creating hotter environments for urban residents. Existing measurements of heat and heat stress, however, are often insufficient to capture intra-urban variability of exposure. This study provides a replicable method for modeling air temperature, humidity, and heat stress over an urban area, engaging citizens in [...]
Systemic Vulnerabilities in Hispanic and Latinx Immigrant Communities Led to the Reliance on an Informal Warning System in the December 10–11, 2021 Tornado Outbreak
Published: 2022-12-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
On December 10–11, 2021, the deadliest December tornado outbreak on record produced a family of EF4 tornadoes that severely impacted communities in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. Although the National Weather Service anticipated the outbreak three days earlier, not all communities received life-saving information before, during, or after the disaster. To examine systemic [...]
Basin-scale hydrodynamics and physical connectivity in a Great Patagonian Lake
Published: 2022-12-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Patagonian lakes are one of the most unexplored aquatic environments on Earth, and little is known about their thermo-hydrodynamics and current trophic state. Meanwhile, increasing urbanization and industrialization in their catchments compromise their health. Here, we investigate Lake Llanquihue, one of the Earth's great freshwater bodies in Northern Patagonia, Chile. Still considered a pristine [...]