Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Sorption vs Adsorption: the words they are a-changin', not the phenomena
Published: 2022-05-17
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
In this discussion, we highlight that the terms sorption and adsorption are often confused and misused in many articles. Even if one thought their formal definition is well known, this does not appear to be the case. We recommend encouragement to adopt the word adsorption only when fully supported by appropriate data and using the sorption terminology when it is more speculative, typically in [...]
Quantifying excess heavy metal concentrations in drainage basins using conservative mixing models
Published: 2022-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
High concentrations of heavy metals and other pollutants in river sediments can have detrimental effects on the ecosystem and humans. The composition of river sediments throughout drainage basins therefore provides important information for environmental monitoring. An obvious first step for using river sediment compositions for monitoring is to quantify natural baseline concentrations. Once [...]
Global dynamics of the offshore wind energy sector monitored with Sentinel-1: Turbine count, installed capacity and site specifications
Published: 2022-04-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Earth Sciences, Statistics and Probability
With the promotion of renewable energy production and a planned phaseout of fossil fuels until 2040, the offshore wind energy sector has started to expand and will continue to increase its capacity in the upcoming decades. This study presents how the installed capacity can be derived from radar imagery provided by the Sentinel-1 mission for all offshore wind turbines on the entire Earth. By [...]
Democratizing Deep Learning Applications in Earth and Climate Sciences on the Web: EarthAIHub
Published: 2022-04-20
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
Most deep learning application studies have limited accessibility and reproducibility for researchers and students in many domains, especially in earth and climate sciences. In order to provide a step towards improving accessibility to deep learning models in such disciplines, this study presents a community-driven framework and repository, EarthAIHub, that is powered by TensorFlow.js, where deep [...]
A machine learning approach to water quality forecasts and sensor network expansion: Case study in the Wabash River Basin, USA
Published: 2022-04-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Midwestern cities require forecasts of surface nitrate loads to bring additional treatment processes online or activate alternative water supplies. Concurrently, networks of nitrate monitoring stations are being deployed in river basins, co-locating water quality observations with established stream gauges. However, tools to evaluate the future value of expanded networks to improve water quality [...]
Data from the drain: a sensor framework that captures multiple drivers of chronic coastal floods
Published: 2022-04-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Tide gauge water levels are commonly used as a proxy for flood incidence on land. These proxies are useful for projecting how sea-level rise (SLR) will increase the frequency of coastal flooding. However, tide gauges do not account for land-based sources of coastal flooding and therefore flood thresholds and the proxies derived from them likely underestimate the current and future frequency of [...]
Fencing farm dams to exclude livestock halves methane emissions and improves water quality.
Published: 2022-03-31
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Agricultural practices have created tens of millions of small artificial water bodies (“farm dams” or “agricultural ponds”) to provide water for domestic livestock worldwide. Among freshwater ecosystems, farm dams have some of the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per m2 due to fertilizer and manure run-off boosting methane production – an extremely potent GHG. However, management strategies [...]
Satellites detect a methane ultra-emission event from an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico
Published: 2022-03-31
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Mitigation of methane emissions from fossil fuel extraction, processing and transport is one of the most effective ways to slow global warming. Satellite-based methods are being instrumental for the detection, characterization, and quantification of this type of emissions. However, despite the rapid development of satellite-based methane plume detection methods for terrestrial surfaces, there is [...]
Practical Reproducibility in Geography and Geosciences
Published: 2022-03-28
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Higher Education
Reproducible research is often perceived as a technological challenge, but it is rooted in the challenge to improve scholarly communication in an age of digitisation. When computers become involved and researchers want to allow other scientists to inspect, understand, evaluate, and build upon their work, they need to create a research compendium that includes the code, data, computing [...]
Automated machine learning to evaluate the information content of tropospheric trace gas columns for fine particle estimates over India: a modeling testbed
Published: 2022-03-20
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
India is largely devoid of high-quality and reliable on-the-ground measurements of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Ground-level PM2.5 concentrations are estimated from publicly available satellite Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) products combined with other information. Prior research has largely overlooked the possibility of gaining additional accuracy and insights into the sources of PM using [...]
On the estimation of landslide intensity, hazard and density via data-driven models
Published: 2022-03-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Maps that attempt to predict landslide occurrences have essentially stayed the same since Brabb, E.E., Pampeyan, E.H. and Bonilla, M.G. (1972) Landslide susceptibility in San Mateo County, California (No. 360), US Geological Survey. The tools have certainly changed in fifty years. But, the geomorphological community addressed and still addresses this issue by estimating whether a given slope is [...]
Multi-faceted analyses of seasonal trends and drivers of land surface variables in Indo-Gangetic river basins
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Statistics and Probability
The Indo-Gangetic river basins feature a wide range of climatic, topographic, and land cover characteristics providing a suitable setting for the exploration of multivariate time series. Here, we collocated a comprehensive feature space for these river basins including Earth observation time series on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), surface water area (SWA), and snow cover area [...]
Scaling relationships for whole-lake primary production
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Scaling relationships provide simple rules for understanding complex ecological patterns. We evaluated scaling relationships between whole-lake (benthic + pelagic) primary production and the surface areas and volumes of 73 lakes. Whole-lake primary production scales isometrically with surface area, after accounting for latitudinal gradients of temperature and insolation. Whole-lake primary [...]
The size-distribution of Earth’s lakes and ponds: limits to power-law behavior
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Global-scale characterizations of Earth's lakes and ponds assume their surface areas are power-law distributed across the full size range. However, empirical power-laws only hold across finite ranges of scales. In this paper, we synthesize evidence for upper and lower limits to power-law behavior in lake size-distributions. We find support for the power-law assumption in general. We also find [...]
The relationship between lake surface area and maximum depth
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Maximum depth varies among lakes from $<$1 to 1741 meters, but attempts to explain this variation have achieved little predictive power. In this paper, we describe the probability distribution of maximum depths based on recent developments in the theory of fractal Brownian motions. The theoretical distribution is right-tailed and adequately captures variations in maximum depth in a dataset of [...]