Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Daily stream temperature predictions for free-flowing streams in the Pacific Northwest, USA
Published: 2023-04-05
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Supporting sustainable lotic ecosystems and thermal habitats for cold-water species like salmonids requires estimates of stream temperature that are high in scope and resolution across space and time. We combined and enhanced elements of existing stream temperature models to produce a new statistical model to address this need. This model reflects mechanistic processes using publicly available [...]
The Effect of Preferential Nucleation Sites on the Distribution of Secondary Mineral Precipitates
Published: 2023-03-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
In the process of mineral nucleation and growth, substrate surface properties and substrate types introduce favorable areas where nucleation events are more likely to occur. The preferential sites for mineral nucleation exist because of the lower interfacial free energy between the precipitating phase and the substrate. In this work, we used a pore-scale Lattice Boltzmann (LB)-based reactive [...]
Precipitation-induced Geometry Evolution during Reactive Transport: Experimental and Numerical Insights into Stochastic Dynamics of Mineral Growth
Published: 2023-03-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Crystal nucleation, precipitation, and growth during a reactive fluid flow and solute transport are critical in many natural and industrial systems. Mineral growth is a prime example where (geo)chemical reactions give rise to geometry evolution in porous media. Motivated by the importance of incorporating stochastic dynamics of nucleation, crystallization, and growth kinetics in studying a [...]
Data, knowledge and modeling challenges for science-informed management of river deltas
Published: 2023-03-16
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
450 million people live on river deltas and thus on land that is precariously low above the sea level and sinking because of human activities and natural processes. Although global debates around coastal risk typically focus on sea level rise, it is sinking lands and rising seas that together endanger lives and livelihoods in river deltas. However, the ability to quantify and address those risks [...]
From source to sea: Floating macroplastic transport along the Rhine river
Published: 2023-03-13
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Other Environmental Sciences
Rivers are pathways and storage zones for plastic pollution. Land-based plastic waste enters river systems through anthropogenic and hydrometeorological processes, after which they are transported and retained. Only a fraction is assumed to make it into the ocean. Understanding and quantifying river plastic transport is important to optimize prevention and reduction strategies, and to evaluate [...]
Operationalizing an open-source dashboard for communicating results of wastewater-based epidemiology
Published: 2023-03-03
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
COVID-19 saw the expansion of public health communication tools to manage and inform the pandemic as it evolved. While the utility of these tools is important in and of itself, it was also the case that during this time experts honed the effectiveness in a near real-time fashion. One tool that saw extensive use was the public health dashboard, web-based visualization tools that communicate [...]
Evaluating Clean Water Act progress drivers for Idaho rivers and streams 2002-2022
Published: 2023-03-03
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
In the United States, the Clean Water Act (CWA) is the primary legislation driving surface water quality management. Its goal is to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” Section 305(b) of the CWA requires states to document CWA progress by reporting whether applicable water quality standards are achieved for all state waters every two [...]
Large variation in Mekong river plastic transport between wet and dry season
Published: 2023-02-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Plastic pollution in rivers is of increased global concern. Rivers act both as pathways for land-based plastic waste into the ocean, and as plastic reservoirs for long-term retention. Reliable observations are key to designing, optimizing and evaluating strategies to prevent and reduce plastic pollution. Several measurement methods have been developed to quantify macroplastic ($>$0.5 cm) storage [...]
Quantifying fire-specific smoke severity
Published: 2023-02-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rapidly changing wildfire regimes across the Western US has driven more frequent and severe wildfires, resulting in wide-ranging societal threats from the wildfires themselves and the smoke that they generate. However, common measures of fire severity focus on what is burned and do not account for the societal impacts of the smoke generated from each fire. We combine satellite-derived fire scars, [...]
Desiccation of ecosystem-critical microbialites in the shrinking Great Salt Lake, Utah (USA)
Published: 2023-02-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Great Salt Lake hosts an ecosystem that is critical to migratory birds and international aquaculture, yet it is currently threatened by falling lake elevation and high lakewater salinity resulting from water diversions in the upstream watershed and the enduring megadrought in the western United States. Microbialite reefs underpin the ecosystem, hosting a surface microbial community that is [...]
Under-ice and open-water ecosystem metabolism in temperate water bodies
Published: 2023-02-01
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Winter, historically a largely un-monitored season, is influential and changing. There is evidence of the importance of under-ice phytoplankton in temperate lakes, but it is currently unknown if high winter phytoplankton biomass translates to high productivity and what influence it has on year-round lake metabolism. Winters are getting shorter, but our ability to forecast change is hindered by [...]
Leaving a plastic legacy: current and future scenarios for mismanaged plastic waste in rivers
Published: 2023-01-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Mismanaged plastic waste (MPW) entering the riverine environment is concerning, given that most plastic pollution never reaches the oceans, and it has a severe negative impact on terrestrial ecosystems. However, significant knowledge gaps on the storage and remobilization of MPW within different rivers over varying timescales remain. Here we analyze the exposure of river systems to MPW to better [...]
Deforestation as an anthropogenic driver of mercury pollution
Published: 2023-01-24
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Deforestation reduces the capacity of the terrestrial biosphere to take up the toxic pollutant mercury (Hg) and enhances the release of secondary Hg from soils. The consequences of deforestation for Hg cycling are not currently considered by anthropogenic emissions inventories or specifically addressed under the global Minamata Convention on Mercury. Using global Hg modeling constrained by field [...]
EZ-InSAR: An Easy-to-use Open-source Toolbox for Mapping Ground Surface Deformation using Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Software Engineering
Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) is a space-borne geodetic technique that can map ground displacement at millimetre accuracy. Via the new era for InSAR applications provided by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR satellites, several open-source software packages exist for processing the SAR data, obtaining high- quality ground deformation maps but still requires a deep [...]
Identifying the regional emergence of climate patterns in the ARISE-SAI-1.5 simulations
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed form of solar climate invention (SCI) that could potentially reduce the amount of future warming from externally-forced climate change. However, more research is needed, as there are significant uncertainties surrounding the possible impacts of SCI, including unforeseen effects on regional climate patterns. In this study, we consider a climate model [...]