Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Is the smoke aloft? Caveats regarding the use of the Hazard Mapping System (HMS) smoke product as a proxy for surface smoke presence across the United States
Published: 2023-09-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Background: NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System (HMS) smoke product comprises smoke plumes digitized from satellite imagery. Recent studies have used HMS as a proxy for surface smoke presence. Aims: We quantify how well HMS agrees with airport observations, air quality station measurements, and model estimates of near-surface smoke. Methods: We quantify the agreement in smoke days and trends, [...]
Using convex optimization to efficiently apportion tracer and pollutant sources from point concentration observations
Published: 2023-09-05
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics
Rivers transport elements, minerals, chemicals, and pollutants produced in their upstream basins. A sample from a river is a mixture of all of its upstream sources, making it challenging to pinpoint the contribution from each individual source. Here, we show how a nested sample design and convex optimization can be used to efficiently unmix downstream samples of a well-mixed, conservative tracer [...]
SeisMIC - an Open Source Python Toolset to Compute Velocity Changes from Ambient Seismic Noise
Published: 2023-09-01
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present SeisMIC, a fast, versatile, and adaptable open-source software to estimate seismic velocity changes from ambient seismic noise. SeisMIC includes a broad set of tools and functions to facilitate end-to-end processing of ambient noise data, from data retrieval and raw data analysis via spectrogram computation, over waveform coherence analysis, to post-processing of the final velocity [...]
Understanding Europe’s forest harvesting regimes
Published: 2023-08-31
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations
The functioning and structure of most European forests are actively shaped by intensive human use. Harvesting of wood is one of the key processes of forest management, making it a crucial element to include in any large-scale analysis of forest ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of how forests are harvested across Europe is limited, as the true harvest regimes – a realisation of decisions made by [...]
Why is it critical to revisit significance and consequences of salt precipitation during CO2 injection?
Published: 2023-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry
Among the candidates for CO2 sequestration, deep saline aquifers are considered the best option because of their storage capacity and proximity to emission sources. Injection of large volumes (million tons scale) of supercritical CO2 into the geological formations causes evaporation of formation water near wellbores and precipitation of salt crystals inside the porous medium. CO2-induced salt [...]
GossenAIA2015-RapaNuislides
Published: 2023-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A slide presentation from AIA 116th Annual Conference, New Orleans, Jan 8-11 2015. The 149 slides in pdf format are from the original Keynote presentation: Deforestation, Drought and Humans: The Collapse Theory is Dead-New Evidence of Sustainability and Survival.
imc-precip-iso: Open monthly stable isotope data of precipitation over the Indonesian Maritime Continent
Published: 2023-08-12
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Stable isotopes, $\delta^2$H, $\delta^{18}$O, and d-excess, are valuable tools as natural tracers of diffusion processes and phase changes in the global hydroclimatological cycle. The Indonesian Maritime Continent (IMC) is an archipelago area surrounded by very warm waters which induce convective activities as the primary heat source driving global atmospheric circulation. Given the central role [...]
M-band discrete wavelet transform–based deep learning algorithm for identifying thermokarst lakes in the QinghaiTibetan Plateau
Published: 2023-08-12
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Thermokarst lakes serve as key signs of permafrost thaw, and as point sources of CH4 in the present and near future. However, detailed information on the distribution of thermokarst lakes remains sparse across the entire permafrost region on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP). In this research, we developed a new discrete wavelet transform (DWT)–based dual-input deep learning (DL) model using a [...]
Can nature-based solutions support economic recovery? A review of reviews on the economic outcomes of NbS
Published: 2023-08-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Nature-based solutions (NbS) involve working with nature to address societal challenges, with benefits for both people and biodiversity. However, their potential role in recovery from economic crises, such as those arising from conflicts or pandemics, remains underexplored. We conducted a systematic review of reviews on the economic impact of nature-based interventions. From 46 relevant reviews, [...]
MEIC-global-CO2: a new global CO2 emission inventory with highly-resolved source category and sub-country information
Published: 2023-08-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
CO2 emission inventory provides fundamental data for climate research and emission mitigation. Currently, most global CO2 emission inventories were developed with energy statistics from International Energy Agency (IEA) and were available at country level with limited source categories. Here, as the first step toward a high-resolution and dynamic updated global CO2 emission database, we developed [...]
Plastics in the deep sea – a global estimate of the ocean floor reservoir
Published: 2023-07-22
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The exponential increase in plastic production coupled with variable global waste management system efficiencies has resulted in large amounts of plastic waste entering the ocean every year. Although we know millions of tonnes of plastic have entered the oceans, we do not yet understand the patterns of its accumulation across space nor the drivers of these patterns. The deep ocean is expected to [...]
Adaptation to climate damages is not inevitable
Published: 2023-07-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Understanding how climate change will affect human welfare must account for how humans will adapt to the changing environment. Adaptations are often local, unobserved, or will only emerge in the future, posing a challenge for attempts to empirically derive climate damage functions and leading to claims that such empirically based functions overestimate the future economic costs of warming. By [...]
Climate Resilience of small-town water utilities in Eastern Ethiopia
Published: 2023-07-15
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Building a resilient water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) system is more important than ever since climate change threatens WASH, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The Government of Ethiopia stresses climate-resilient WASH through its One WASH National Program, albeit it may be challenging to ascertain the resilience due to the absence of an easy-to-use monitoring tool. The “How [...]
Nutrient concentrations and nitrogen speciation in tropical watersheds of central Panama
Published: 2023-07-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
We present chemical analyses from rivers and streams in five partly to near-fully forested watersheds in the humid tropics of central Panama. Contrary to the situation observed for temperate watersheds in the Northern Hemisphere, the concentration of dissolved inorganic nitrogen in the Panamanian watersheds is low (mostly <2.6 µmol L-1), whereas concentrations of organic nitrogen are several [...]
Data Cubes for Earth System Research: Challenges Ahead
Published: 2023-07-11
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Progress in Earth system science is accelerating rapidly, due to the increasing availability of multivariate datasets, often global, with moderate to high spatio-temporal resolutions. Turning these data into knowledge presents interoperability, technical, analytical, and other challenges. Earth System Data Cubes (ESDCs) have surfaced as essential tools, offering analysis-ready, cloud-optimised [...]