Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Feedback between drought and deforestation in the Amazon
Published: 2020-01-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Deforestation and drought are among the greatest environmental pressures on the Amazon rainforest, possibly destabilizing the forest-climate system. Deforestation in the Amazon reduces rainfall regionally, while this deforestation itself has been reported to be facilitated by droughts. Here we quantify the interactions between drought and deforestation spatially across the Amazon during the early [...]
Distributed Acoustic Sensing of Microseismic Sources and Wave Propagation in Glaciated Terrain
Published: 2020-01-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Records of Alpine microseismicity are a powerful tool to study landscape-shaping processes and warn against hazardous mass movements. Unfortunately, seismic sensor coverage in Alpine regions is typically insufficient. Here we show that distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) bridges critical observational gaps of seismogenic processes in Alpine terrain. Dynamic strain measurements in a 1 km long fiber [...]
Stochastic, empirically‐informed model of landscape dynamics and its application to deforestation scenarios
Published: 2019-12-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Land change including deforestation undermines the sustainability of the environment. Using data on 1992‐2015 pattern change in over 1.7 million meso‐scale landscapes worldwide we developed a stochastic model of long‐term landscape dynamics. The model suggests that observed heterogeneous landscapes are short‐lived stages in a transition between quasi‐stable homogeneous landscapes of different [...]
Comment on ‘Unintentional unfairness when applying new greenhouse gas emissions metrics at country level’
Published: 2019-12-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Here, we provide a comment in response to a recently published paper ‘Unintentional unfairness when applying new greenhouse gas emissions metrics at country level’ by Rogelj and Schleussner (2019). We note a number of errors in their critique of the use of GWP* to relate cumulative and short-lived climate pollutants, argue that their logic is flawed, their ethical considerations are narrow and [...]
Characterisation and controls on mineral-sorbed organic matter from a variety of groundwater environments
Published: 2019-12-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Detailed investigations into natural groundwater organic matter (OM) as carbon sources or sinks in the natural carbon cycle are generally limited. Groundwater OM concentration and composition is altered by biodegradation and sorption to minerals. In the saturated zone of an aquifer, dissolved organic matter (DOM) may represent a significant fraction of the natural groundwater dissolved organic [...]
Policy Bridge: Air Quality Impacts from Oil and Natural Gas Development in Colorado
Published: 2019-12-13
Subjects: Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The rise of hydraulic fracturing techniques has fostered rapid growth of oil and natural gas extraction in areas across the United States. In the Denver-Julesburg Basin (DJB), which mostly overlaps with Weld County in the Northern Colorado Front Range (NCFR) north of the City of Denver Metropolitan Area (DMA), the well drilling has increasingly approached, and in many instances moved into urban [...]
Future heat extremes likely to have been underestimated
Published: 2019-12-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In a warming world, temperature extremes are expected to show a distinguishable change over much of the globe1 and in many regions this change has already been detected in observations2,3. Although previous studies predict an increase in heat extreme events, the magnitude of the change varies greatly among different models even for the same mean warming4. This uncertainty has been linked to [...]
Stronger Atlantic hurricanes: Validating Elsner et al. (2008)
Published: 2019-12-05
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Using satellite derived wind speed estimates from tropical cyclones over the 25-year period 1981--2006, Elsner et al. (2008) showed the strongest tropical cyclones getting stronger. They related the increasing intensity to rising ocean temperatures consistent with theory. Oceans continued to warm since that paper was published so the intensity of the strongest cyclones should have continued [...]
An interpreted language implementation of the Vaganov-Shashkin tree-ring proxy system model
Published: 2019-12-05
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We describe the implementation of the Vaganov-Shashkin tree-ring growth model (VSM) in MATLAB. VSM, originally written in Fortran, mimics subdaily and daily resolution processes of cambial growth as a function of soil moisture, air temperature, and insolation, with environmental forcing modeled as the principle of limiting factors. The re-implementation in a high level interpreted language, [...]
Simultaneous measurement of aqueous redox sensitive elements and their species across soil-water interface
Published: 2019-11-20
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Soil-water interface (SWI) hosts versatile elements speciation and controls elements cycling in flooded lands. However, the study on the element’s interaction along SWI is limited by the sampling and analytical methods available. Here with an optimized ICP-MS method and an updated porewater sampler, we succeeded in simultaneously mapping the elements of environmental concerns in every 1.7 mm [...]
Macrophyte cover type and groundwater as the key drivers of the extremely high organic carbon concentration of soda pans
Published: 2019-11-20
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
1. Endorheic soda pans are among the aquatic systems that have the highest dissolved organic carbon (DOC) content on the planet with concentrations reaching values close to 1 g L−1. Considering the importance of inland waters in the global carbon cycle, the understanding of the drivers of such outstanding aquatic organic carbon pools is eminent. The soda pans of the Carpathian Basin present a [...]
Low-cost electronic sensors for environmental research: pitfalls and opportunities
Published: 2019-11-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Repeat observations underpin our understanding of environmental processes but financial constraints often limit scientists’ ability to deploy dense networks of conventional commercial instrumentation. Rapid growth in the Internet-Of-Things (IOT) and the maker movement is paving the way for low-cost electronic sensors to transform global environmental monitoring. Accessible and inexpensive sensor [...]
Equifinality, Sloppiness, and emergent model structures of mechanistic soil biogeochemical models
Published: 2019-11-05
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Biogeochemical models increasingly consider the microbial control of car- bon cycling in soil. The major current challenge is to validate mechanistic descriptions of microbial processes and predicted system responses against experimental observations. We analyzed soil biochemical models of different complexity regarding parameter identifiability using information geometry, i.e. a model is [...]
The global lake area, climate, and population dataset
Published: 2019-11-05
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
An increasing population in conjunction with a changing climate necessitates a detailed understanding of water abundance at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Remote sensing has provided massive data volumes to track fluctuations in water quantity, yet contextualizing water abundance with other local, regional, and global trends remains challenging by often requiring large computational [...]
Detection and temperature estimation of gas flares with nocturnal Landsat OLI
Published: 2019-11-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Natural gas flaring is a worldwide polluting activity carried out during oil production. Satellite imagery has emerged as a low-cost, objective tool to measure and monitor gas flaring. Since 2012, hectometre-resolution infrared imagery from the Suomi NPP VIIRS sensor has been used to operationally monitor global gas flaring (Elvidge et al. 2016). Since 2013, nocturnal acquisitions of Landsat 8 [...]