Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Investigating the water movements around a shallow shipwreck in Big Tub Harbour of Lake Huron: implications for managing underwater shipwrecks.
Published: 2019-06-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Sweepstakes in Fathom Five National Marine Park is one of Ontarios more iconic shipwrecks. Continued exposure to water currents has directly and indirectly affected the integrity of the wreck and resulted in management interventions including efforts to stabilize the wreck and control vessel activity. An extensive series of field measurements were made during the peak tourist season in the [...]
Information-theoretic Portfolio Decision Model for Optimal Flood Management
Published: 2019-06-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Sustainability, Systems Engineering, Water Resource Management
The increasing impact of flooding urges more effective flood management strategies to guarantee sustainable ecosystem development. Recent catastrophes underline the importance of avoiding local flood management, but characterizing large scale basin wide approaches for systemic flood risk management. Here we introduce an information-theoretic Portfolio Decision Model (iPDM) for the optimization of [...]
Mixing, stratification and plankton under lake-ice during winter in a large lake: implications for spring dissolved oxygen levels
Published: 2019-06-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The mixing and stratification present under the ice during winter can have a profound influence on the following summertime hypolimnetic oxygen levels. During winter, plankton rely on updrafts caused by convection to remain in the photic zone in ice-covered lakes, thus there is a crucial link in winter between light levels, under-ice circulation and dissolved oxygen (DO) production. Detailed [...]
Probing the chemical transformation of seawater-soluble crude oil components during microbial oxidation
Published: 2019-06-18
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Studies assessing the environmental impacts of oil spills focus primarily on the non-water-soluble components, leaving the fate of the water-soluble fraction (WSF) largely unexplored. We employed untargeted chemical analysis along with biological information to probe the transformation of crude oil WSF in seawater, in the absence of light, in a laboratory experiment. Over a 14-day incubation, [...]
Distributed sensing of earthquakes and ocean-solid Earth interactions on seafloor telecom cables
Published: 2019-06-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Two thirds of the surface of our planet are covered by water and are still poorly instrumented, which has prevented the earth science community from addressing numerous key scientific questions. The potential to leverage the existing fiber optic seafloor telecom cables that criss-cross the oceans, by turning them into dense arrays of seismo-acoustic sensors, remains to be evaluated. Here, we [...]
Decadal land-use/land-cover and land surface temperature change in Dubai and implications on the urban heat island effect: A preliminary assessment
Published: 2019-06-05
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The emirate of Dubai is the most populous and most developed of the seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates. By the end of the 20th century, the emirate had shifted its economy from being primarily petroleum-based to a focus on tourism and financial services. The emirate’s capital, also named Dubai, has been growing at a rapid pace; the population in 1999 was 862,000 inhabitants, [...]
Characterising Land Cover Change in Brunei Darussalam’s Capital District
Published: 2019-06-03
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In fast-developing regions, like Southeast-Asia, monitoring urban areas presents a challenge given the lack of publicly available data. This is an issue that precludes the nuances of a citys growth and undermines the way land-use is considered with respect to planning. The issue of data availability is very much present in the small nation of Brunei. Little is still known about the spatiotemporal [...]
A Stella® version of the Arctic Mediterranean Double Estuarine Circulation model: SAMDEC v1.0
Published: 2019-05-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Arctic Mediterranean can be described as a double estuarine circulation regime. This observed circulation feature, which connects the North Atlantic to the Arctic Ocean, is composed of two interconnected branches of circulation: an overturning circulation, where dense water formed in the Nordic Seas returns toward the Atlantic and an estuarine circulation, where the East Greenland Current [...]
Lake Level Fluctuations in the Northern Great Basin for the Last 25,000 years
Published: 2019-05-30
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ~23,000 to 19,000 years ago or ka) and through the last deglaciation, the Great Basin physiographic region in the western United States was marked by multiple extensive lake systems, as recorded by proxy evidence and lake sediments. However, temporal constraints on the growth, desiccation, and timing of lake highstands remain poorly constrained. Studies aimed [...]
HESS Opinions: Improving the evaluation of groundwater representation in continental to global scale models
Published: 2019-05-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Continental- to global-scale hydrologic and land surface models increasingly include representations of the groundwater system, driven by crucial Earth science and sustainability problems. These models are essential for examining, communicating, and understanding the dynamic interactions between the Earth System above and below the land surface as well as the opportunities and limits of [...]
Representation of European hydroclimatic patterns with Self-Organizing Maps
Published: 2019-05-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Planetary Sciences
Self-Organizing Maps provide a powerful, non-linear technique of dimensionality reduction that can be used to identify clusters with similar attributes. Here, they were constructed from a 1000-year-long gridded palaeoclimatic dataset, namely the Old World Drought Atlas, to detect regions of homogeneous hydroclimatic variability across the European continent. A classification scheme of 10 regions [...]
Investigation of the Likelihood of Green Infrastructure (GI) Enhancement along Linear Waterways or on Derelict Sites (DS) Using Machine Learning.
Published: 2019-05-08
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Studies evaluating potential of Green Infrastructure (GI) development using traditional Boolean logic-based multi-criteria analysis methods are not capable of predicting future GI development under dynamic urban scape. This study evaluated robust soft-computing-based methods of artificial intelligence (Artificial Neural Network, Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Interface-System) and used statistical [...]
Trends of hydroclimatic intensity in Colombia
Published: 2019-05-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management
Prediction of changes in precipitation in upcoming years and decades caused by global climate change associated with the greenhouse effect, deforestation and other anthropic perturbations is a practical and scientific problem of high complexity and huge consequences. To advance toward this challenge we look at the daily historical record of all available rain gauges in Colombia to estimate an [...]
Application of multivariate statistical methods to hydrogeological property parameterisation from geotechnical and geophysical data
Published: 2019-04-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Hydrology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Hydrogeological data sets are often relatively sparse compared to the scale of investigation, resulting in degrees of uncertainty which, although constrained, may be considered as not acceptable for achieving the desired precision in numerical modelling. The potential use of multivariate statistical methods in identifying correlations between geotechnical properties of the rock mass and hydraulic [...]
Radiation Hazard evaluation and spatial dose rate mapping in mineralized region of Siwaliks: A case study from Una, Kangra and Hamirpur distt, Himachal Pradesh, India.
Published: 2019-04-25
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The following work is a part of wider uranium prospecting programme of the Atomic Mineral Directorate for Exploration and Research (AMD) for mapping radioactive anomalies in mineralized regions of Siwalik, Himachal Pradesh. This study reports the analysis of average activity concentration, potential radiological hazards; radium equivalent activity (Raeq), external hazard index (Hex), internal [...]