Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Too many streams and not enough time or money? Analytical depletion functions for streamflow depletion estimates
Published: 2022-11-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Groundwater pumping can cause streamflow depletion by reducing groundwater discharge to streams and/or inducing surface water infiltration. Analytical and numerical models are two standard methods used to predict streamflow depletion. Numerical models require extensive data and efforts to develop robust estimates, while analytical models are easy to implement with low data and experience [...]
The Importance of Internal Climate Variability in Climate Impact Projections
Published: 2022-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Uncertainty in climate projections is driven by three components: scenario uncertainty, inter-model uncertainty, and internal variability. Although socioeconomic climate impact studies increasingly take into account the first two components, little attention has been paid to the role of internal variability, though underestimating this uncertainty may lead to underestimating the socioeconomic [...]
Short Communication: The Wasserstein distance as a dissimilarity metric for comparing detrital age spectra, and other geological distributions
Published: 2022-10-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Stratigraphy, Tectonics and Structure
Distributional data such as detrital age populations or grain size distributions are common in the geological sciences. As analytical techniques become more sophisticated, increasingly large amounts of distributional data are being gathered. These advances require quantitative and objective methods, such as multidimensional scaling (MDS), to analyse large numbers of samples. Crucial to such [...]
Fisher Discriminant Analysis for Extracting Interpretable Phenological Information from Multivariate Time Series Data
Published: 2022-10-24
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Remote Sensing
For many applications in environmental remote sensing, the interpretation of a given measurement depends strongly on what time of year the measurement was taken. This is particularly the case for phenology studies concerned with identifying when plant developmental transitions occur, but it is also true for a wide range of applications including vegetation species classification, crop yield [...]
Air Quality-Related Equity Implications of U.S. Decarbonization Policy
Published: 2022-10-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
We quantify potential air pollution exposure reductions resulting from U.S. federal carbon policy, and consider the implications of resulting health benefits for exposure disparities across racial/ethnic groups. We assess reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 50% in 2030 relative to 2005 levels, comparable in magnitude to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Using energy-economic scenarios [...]
Plastics Pollution and the Planetary Boundaries framework
Published: 2022-10-22
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Plastics are novel entities that have exceeded the planetary safe operating space due to extensive and resource-intensive production, uncontrolled environmental releases, and failure to control the chemicals within the materials. This paper examines evidence and discusses how plastics pollution affects Earth-system processes along the impact pathway from production, to release, to environmental [...]
Effect of mineral heterogeneity on fracture dissolution in carbonate-rich caprocks during subsurface CO2 injection
Published: 2022-10-03
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Chemical interactions between CO2, brine, and caprock-forming minerals might lead to dissolution of the fractures present in the caprock of CO2 storage sites. One factor that can affect the chemically induced fracture alterations is mineral heterogeneity in the caprock. In this study, we investigate the effect of mineral heterogeneity on fracture dissolution of four carbonate-rich caprock [...]
Loop Current attenuation after the Mid-Pleistocene Transition contributes to Northern hemisphere cooling
Published: 2022-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The beginning of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) ~920 ka BP marked the expansion of northern hemisphere ice shields and caused a significant climate change in NW Europe. The MPT ended with the establishment of the 100 kyr ice age cyclicity at ~640 ka BP, due to orbital eccentricity changes. Previous studies explained the northern hemisphere cooling by cooling of sea-surface temperatures, [...]
Geochemical mapping by unmixing alluvial sediments: An example from northern Australia
Published: 2022-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geomorphology, Natural Resource Economics, Sedimentology, Soil Science, Water Resource Management
Alluvial sediments have long been used in geochemical surveys as their compositions are assumed to be representative of areas upstream. Overbank and floodplain sediments, in particular, are increasingly used for regional to continental-scale geochemical mapping. However, during downstream transport, sediments from heterogeneous source regions are carried away from their source regions and mixed. [...]
Marine Radiocarbon Calibration in Polar Regions: A Simple Approximate Approach using Marine20
Published: 2022-09-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
The Marine20 radiocarbon (14C) age calibration curve, and all earlier marine radiocarbon calibration curves from the IntCal group, must be used extremely cautiously for the calibration of marine 14C samples from polar regions (outside ~ 40ºS – 40ºN) during glacial periods. Calibrating polar 14C marine samples from glacial periods against any Marine calibration curve (Marine20 or any earlier [...]
Emerging advanced oxidation processes for water and wastewater treatment – guidance for systematic future research
Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences
Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) for water treatment are a growing research field with a large variety of different concepts and materials being tested at laboratory scale. However, only few concepts have been translated into pilot- and full-scale operation recently. One major concern are the inconsistent experimental approaches applied across different studies that impede identification, [...]
PubDAS: a PUBlic Distributed Acoustic Sensing datasets repository for geosciences
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
During the past few years, Distributing Acoustic Sensing (DAS) has become an invaluable tool for recording high-fidelity seismic wavefields with great spatiotemporal resolutions. However, the considerable amount of data generated during DAS experiments limits their distribution with the broader scientific community. Such a bottleneck inherently slows down the pursuit of new scientific discoveries [...]
Multi-fold increase in rainforests tipping risk beyond 1.5-2⁰C warming
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Tropical rainforests invest in their root systems to store soil moisture from water-rich periods for use in water-scarce periods. An inadequate root-zone soil moisture storage predisposes or forces these forest ecosystems to transition to a savanna-like state, devoid of their native structure and functions. Yet changes in soil moisture storage and its influence on the rainforest ecosystems under [...]
Isotopically labeled ozone: a new approach to elucidate the formation of ozonation products
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
As ozonation becomes a widespread treatment for removal of chemicals of emerging concern in wastewater treatment plant effluents, there are increasing concerns regarding the formation of ozonation products (OPs), and their possible impacts on the aquatic environment and eventually human health. In this study, a novel method was developed that utilizes heavy oxygen (18O2) for the production of [...]
Source location and wavefield characterization of river-induced seismic tremor
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
River-induced seismic signal (tremor) recorded by deploying seismic stations close to the river can be used to obtain the flow characteristics of rivers indirectly. This task becomes challenging when the tremor is contaminated by strong cultural noise. We conducted an experiment next to Avoca River, County Wicklow, Ireland. We locate and characterize the river-induced tremor by combining the [...]