Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Large-Scale Controlled Experiment Demonstrates Effectiveness of Methane Leak Detection and Repair Programs at Oil and Gas Facilities
Published: 2021-12-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The importance of reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations as a near-term climate action is widely recognized. Most jurisdictions around the globe using leak detection and repair (LDAR) programs to find and fix methane leaks. In this work, we empirically evaluate the efficacy of LDAR programs using a large-scale, bottom-up, randomized controlled field experiment across ~200 oil and [...]
Wildfire Smoke Exposure Worsens Learning Outcomes
Published: 2021-12-08
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Statistical Models
Wildfires have increased in frequency and severity over the past two decades, threatening to undo substantial air quality improvements. We investigate the effect of wildfire smoke exposure on learning outcomes across the US using standardized test scores from 2009-2016 for nearly 11,700 school districts and satellite-derived estimates of daily smoke exposure. Relative to a school year with no [...]
Evaluating essential features of proppant transport at engineering scales combining field measurements with machine learning algorithms
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Hydraulic Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
The characterization of the proppant transport at a field-engineering scale is still challenging due to the lack of direct subsurface measurements. Features that control the proppant transport may link the experimental and numerical observations to the practical operations at a field scale. To improve the numerical and laboratory simulations, we propose a machine-learning-based workflow to [...]
Methane Fluxes of Vegetated Areas in Natural Freshwater Ecosystems: Assessments and Global Significance
Published: 2021-12-05
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
Freshwater ecosystems, including wetlands, lakes, and running waters, are estimated to contribute roughly 40% to global emissions of methane (CH4), a highly potent greenhouse gas. The emission of CH4 to the atmosphere entails the diffusive, ebullitive, and plant-mediated pathway. The latter, in particular, has been largely understudied and is neither well understood nor quantified. We have [...]
Evidences of horizontal urban heat advection in London using 6 years of data from a citizen weather station network
Published: 2021-12-05
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography
Recent advances in citizen weather station (CWS) networks, with data accessible via crowd-sourcing, provide relevant climatic information to urban scientists and decision makers. In particular, CWS can provide long-term measurements of urban heat and valuable information on spatio-temporal heterogeneity related to horizontal heat advection. In this study, we make the first compilation of a [...]
Estuarine-deltaic controls on coastal carbon burial in the western Ganges-Brahmaputra delta over the last 5,000 years
Published: 2021-11-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management
The Ganges–Brahmaputra fluvial system drains the Himalayas and is one of the largest sources of terrestrial biosphere carbon to the ocean. It represents a major continental reservoir of CO2 associated with c. 1–2 billion tons of sediment transported each year. Shallow coastal environments receive substantial inputs of terrestrial carbon (900 Tg C yr−1), with allochthonous carbon capture on [...]
A review of model-based scenario analysis of poverty for informing sustainability
Published: 2021-11-22
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Dynamic Systems, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the first goal being targeted by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Poverty eradication is a long-term process that faces the challenges of many uncertainties and complex interactions with other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order to better understand poverty and contribute to addressing poverty in a sustainable [...]
Declining Carbon Emission/Concentration during COVID-19: A critical review on temporary relief
Published: 2021-11-22
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
In December 2019 the deadly pandemic COVID-19 traumatized mankind through its lethal impact. To seize the outbreak, nationwide/region-based lockdown strategies were adopted by most of the COVID-19 affected countries. This in turn resulted in restricted transportation via surface, water, and air, as well as significantly reduced working hours of the industry sectors, so on and so forth. [...]
C3S Energy: A climate service for the provision of power supply and demand indicators for Europe based on the ERA5 reanalysis and ENTSO-E data
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Statistical Models
The EU Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has produced an operational climate service, called C3S Energy, designed to enable the energy industry and policymakers to assess the impacts of climate variability and climate change on the energy sector in Europe. The C3S Energy service covers different time horizons, for the past 40 years and the future. It provides time series of electricity [...]
Geographically-resolved social cost of anthropogenic emissions accounting for both direct and climate-mediated effects
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Sustainability
The magnitude and distribution of physical and societal impacts from long-lived greenhouse gases are insensitive to the emission source location; the same is not true for major co-emitted short-lived pollutants like aerosols. Here we combine novel global climate model simulations with established response functions to show that identical aerosols emitted from different regions (Brazil, China, [...]
Airborne laser scanning proxies of canopy light transmission in forests
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Software Engineering, Statistics and Probability
Reliable estimates of canopy light transmission are critical to understanding the structure and function of vegetation communities but are difficult and costly to attain by traditional field inventory methods. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data uniquely provide multi-angular vertically resolved representation of canopy geometry across large geographic areas. While previous studies have proposed [...]
Simulated decline of a northern forest due to anthropogenic controls on the regeneration-mortality balance
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences
The population structure of forests is shaped by balancing the opposing forces of regeneration and mortality, each of which influence C turnover rates and are sensitive to climate. Regeneration underlies the migrational potential of forests to climatic change and remains underserved in modeling studies. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that warming may reduce tree regeneration rates while [...]
Emergence of anthropogenic fire regimes in the southern boreal of Canada
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
While radiative forcing and thus land surface temperatures have been shown to positively correlate with fire severity, precipitation, and lightning strike frequency, the effects of human activity on fire regimes remain difficult to disentangle from geophysical drivers given co-variation between these factors. Here, I analyze fire regimes in the 1919-2012 period across Canada and compare national [...]
Reproducibility in subsurface geoscience
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Cosmochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Hydrology, Mineral Physics, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Sedimentology, Soil Science, Speleology, Stratigraphy, Sustainability, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology, Water Resource Management
Reproducibility, the extent to which consistent results are obtained when an experiment or study is repeated, sits at the foundation of science. The aim of this process is to produce robust findings and knowledge, with reproducibility being the screening tool to benchmark how well we are implementing the scientific method. However, the re-examination of results from many disciplines has caused [...]
Linking technical geothermal potential from borehole heat exchangers and heating demand scenarios on a regional scale
Published: 2021-10-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Extracting shallow geothermal energy using borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) can help decarbonising the residential heating sector. To assist urban planers and policy makers in developing carbon-neutral heating plans the regional technical shallow geothermal potential must be analysed. Here, we propose a methodology to estimate the technical geothermal potential of BHE fields on a regional scale [...]