Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Nitrogen Availability and Denitrification in Urban Agriculture and Regreened Vacant Lots
Published: 2024-02-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Many cities demolish abandoned homes and create regreened vacant lots (RVLs), and an increasingly popular, high-intensity use of RVLs is as urban agriculture (UA) sites. UA may potentially result in higher nitrogen (N) runoff to aquatic ecosystems, but this potential has not been quantified. We examined the role that varying land reuse intensity plays in determining potential for N export via [...]
Unexpected anthropogenic emission decreases are required to explain recent atmospheric mercury concentration declines
Published: 2024-01-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Anthropogenic activities emit ~2000 Mg yr-1 of the toxic pollutant mercury (Hg) into the atmosphere, leading to long-range transport and deposition to remote ecosystems. Global anthropogenic emissions inventories report increases in Northern Hemispheric (NH) Hg emissions during the last three decades, in contradiction with the observed decline in atmospheric Hg concentrations at NH measurement [...]
Non-target screening analysis reveals changes in the molecular composition of the Belukha Ice Core between the pre-industrial and industrial periods (1830-1980 CE)
Published: 2024-01-28
Subjects: Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ice cores are environmental archives that are used to reconstruct past changes in the atmospheric aerosol composition. Most ice-core studies have focused mainly on inorganic species and a few dozen organic molecules. However, organic compounds can account for up to 90% of the aerosol composition, meaning that only a fraction of the organic constituents has been studied, limiting our understanding [...]
Deployment-invariant probability of detection characterization for aerial LiDAR methane detection
Published: 2024-01-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Accurate detection sensitivity characterization of remote methane monitoring technologies is critical for designing, implementing, and auditing effective emissions monitoring and mitigation programs. Several research groups have developed test methods based on single/double-blind controlled release protocols and regression-based data analysis techniques to create probability of detection (PoD) [...]
Unsupervised Structural Damage Assessment from Space using the Segment Anything Model (USDA-SAM): A Case Study of the 2023 Türkiye Earthquake
Published: 2024-01-23
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
This paper explores advanced deep learning methods, specifically utilising the Segment Anything Model (SAM) along with image processing techniques, to evaluate the structural damages caused by the devastating earthquake that occurred in Turkey on February 6, 2023. Leveraging exceptionally high-resolution pre- and post-disaster imagery provided by Maxar Technologies, this paper showcases the [...]
Apportioning sources of chemicals of emerging concern along an urban river with inverse modelling
Published: 2024-01-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Concentrations of chemicals in river water provide crucial information for assessing environmental exposure to fertilisers and insecticides, heavy metals, illicit drugs, pathogens, pharmaceuticals, plastics and perfluorinated substances among others. However, using concentrations measured along waterways to identify sources of contaminants and predict their fate is complicated by downstream [...]
Environmental Signal Propagation in Non-stationary Systems: The Impact of Delta Advance on Terrestrial to Marine Information Transfer
Published: 2024-01-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
When interpreting environmental signals in the deep marine sedimentary archive, separating the record of local flow and sediment dynamics from that of the terrestrial transport system that feeds it can be challenging. We used a physical experiment to study the dynamics of flow and sedimentation on a prograding, hyperpycnal flow-dominated delta, shelf and submarine slope subject to slow rates of [...]
Mineral precipitation and geometry alteration in porous structures: How to upscale variations in permeability-porosity relationship?
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Porous materials in natural and engineered environments are subject to morphological changes resulting from interacting chemical and physical processes. The complexity of coupled flow, transport, and chemical processes that occur on different temporal and spatial scales makes it difficult to predict the resulting porosity and permeability alterations. Delineating the controls of mineral [...]
Untangling intercropping in heterogeneous smallholder maize-cassava farming systems with remote sensing
Published: 2023-12-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earth observation approaches for large-scale crop monocultures are often not transferable to heterogeneous smallholder systems. Key challenges in this regard are intercropping, high intra-field crop type variability, wide sowing windows, presence of non-crop vegetation and small but variable field sizes. Currently, studies on smallholder agriculture mainly focus on specific crops and seldom [...]
GEE-PICX: Generating cloud-free Sentinel-2 and Landsat image composites and spectral indices for custom areas and time frames - a Google Earth Engine web application
Published: 2023-12-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
1. Earth observation satellites are collecting vast amounts of data that are both free and openly accessible. These data have immense potential to support environmental, economic, and social fields. However, along with the increasing availability of remotely sensed data, challenges are also increasing in accessing and processing these data. In particular, easy-to-use solutions for accessing and [...]
Comprehensive review of the annual haze episode in Northern Thailand
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Public Health
The mountainous part of northern Thailand is subject to an intense haze episode occurring almost every year between January and May. In the last couple of decades, this atmospheric phenomenon has been extensively covered in the media and is now a main concern for the population living in this area. In this review, we synthesized the information available from hundreds of publications on air [...]
Salt Precipitation during Geological CO2 Storage: Effect of Access to Continuous Brine Source
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
During CO2 storage, the near-wellbore environment experiences significant chemical, physical, thermal, and mechanical perturbations. Therefore, it is crucial to characterize the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical (THMC) processes in this region through representative experimental tests and numerical simulations to maximize the safety and cost-efficiency of CO2 storage. One common [...]
Experimental and Numerical Description of Mineral Precipitation Dynamics on Heterogeneous Substrate Surfaces
Published: 2023-12-07
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Mineral precipitation reactions are critical in reactive transport studies of porous media due to their significant impacts on flow and transport properties. Understanding the nucleation process, a probabilistic phenomenon that determines the location and distribution of solid formation in space and time domains, is essential for accurately comprehending the effect of mineral precipitation on [...]
Monitoring CO2 Concentrations in Soil Gas: A Novel MRV Approach for Cropland-Based ERW?
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
This paper discusses the challenges we have faced in the past 2.5 years of field experiments trying to measure the speed of Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) in agricultural settings for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. Traditional measurements that allow quantification of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in laboratory ERW tests include chemical analyses of the leached out soil water and monitoring [...]
Formation of giant Siberian gas emission craters (GECs)
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The recent discovery of eight giant gas escape craters (GECs) in the Russian Yamal and Gydan peninsulas has challenged researchers for the past decade. Despite numerous proposed models, ranging from meteor impacts to gas explosions, none provide a comprehensive explanation for why the GECs are found only in this specific region. This study proposes a new general model for the formation of GECs in [...]