Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
Multi-satellite data depicts record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout
Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Accidental blowouts in oil and gas wells can result in large and prolonged methane emissions, which are often unreported when happening in remote places. The rapid advancement of space-based methods for detecting and quantifying methane plumes provides an essential tool for uncovering these super-emission events. We use a range of methane-sensitive satellites to document a methane leak from a [...]
Deployment-invariant probability of detection characterization for aerial LiDAR methane detection
Published: 2024-01-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Accurate detection sensitivity characterization of remote methane monitoring technologies is critical for designing, implementing, and auditing effective emissions monitoring and mitigation programs. Several research groups have developed test methods based on single/double-blind controlled release protocols and regression-based data analysis techniques to create probability of detection (PoD) [...]
Model Ensemble with Dropout for Uncertainty Estimation in Binary Sea Ice or Water Segmentation using Sentinel-1 SAR
Published: 2024-01-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Environmental Monitoring, Signal Processing
Despite the growing use of deep learning in sea ice mapping with SAR imagery, the study of model uncertainty and segmentation results remains limited. Deep learning models often produce overconfident predictions, a concern in sea ice mapping where misclassification can impact marine navigation safety. We incorporate and compare dropout and model ensemble within a convolutional neural network [...]
Apportioning sources of chemicals of emerging concern along an urban river with inverse modelling
Published: 2024-01-18
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Concentrations of chemicals in river water provide crucial information for assessing environmental exposure to fertilisers and insecticides, heavy metals, illicit drugs, pathogens, pharmaceuticals, plastics and perfluorinated substances among others. However, using concentrations measured along waterways to identify sources of contaminants and predict their fate is complicated by downstream [...]
Metrological approach for permafrost temperature measurements
Published: 2024-01-12
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Glaciology
Permafrost degradation is a growing direct impact of climate change. Detecting permafrost reductions, in terms of its extension, deepening of the active layer and rise of the base is fundamental to capture the magnitude of trends and address actions and warnings. Temperature profiles in permafrost allow direct understanding of the status of the frozen ground layer and its evolution in time. The [...]
Bayesian network modelling of phosphorus pollution in agricultural catchments with high-resolution data
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Biochemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Statistical Models
A Bayesian Belief Network was developed to simulate phosphorus (P) loss in an Irish agricultural catchment. Septic tanks and farmyards were included to represent all P sources and assess their effect on model performance. Bayesian priors were defined using daily discharge and turbidity, high-resolution soil P data, expert opinion, and literature. Calibration was done against seven years of daily [...]
Open-source approach for reproducible substrate mapping using semantic segmentation on recreation-grade side scan sonar datasets
Published: 2023-12-21
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Programming Languages and Compilers, Software Engineering, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Knowledge of the variation and distribution of substrates at large spatial extents in aquatic systems, particularly rivers, is severely lacking, impeding species conservation and ecosystem restoration efforts. Air and space-borne remote sensing important for terrestrial and atmospheric measurements are limited in benthic environments due to river stage, turbidity, and canopy cover, requiring [...]
Untangling intercropping in heterogeneous smallholder maize-cassava farming systems with remote sensing
Published: 2023-12-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earth observation approaches for large-scale crop monocultures are often not transferable to heterogeneous smallholder systems. Key challenges in this regard are intercropping, high intra-field crop type variability, wide sowing windows, presence of non-crop vegetation and small but variable field sizes. Currently, studies on smallholder agriculture mainly focus on specific crops and seldom [...]
FootNet v1.0: Development of a machine learning emulator of atmospheric transport
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring
There has been a proliferation of dense observing systems to monitor greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations over the past decade. Estimating emissions with these observations is often done using an atmospheric transport model to characterize the source-receptor relationship, which is commonly termed measurement "footprint". Computing and storing footprints using full-physics models is becoming [...]
PHOTOMOB: AUTOMATED GIS METHOD FOR ESTIMATION OF FRACTIONAL GRAIN DYNAMICS IN GRAVEL BED RIVERS. PART 1: GRAIN SIZE
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Particle entrainment intensity is spatially and temporally variable, making it a complex phenomenon to measure. This paper is the first of a pair, in which we present an automated image processing procedure (PhotoMOB) for monitoring the mobility/stability of gravel river beds. The method is based on local comparison of the shape of the grains identified at the same coordinates between successive [...]
PhotoMOB: Automated GIS method for estimation of fractional grain dynamics in gravel bed rivers. Part 2: Bed stability and fractional mobility
Published: 2023-12-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Bed mobility and stability are spatially and temporally variable, making it a complex phenomenon to study. This paper is the second of a pair, in which we present an automated image processing procedure for monitoring the mobility/stability of gravel river beds. The method is based on local comparison of the shape of the grains identified at the same coordinates between successive photos to [...]
Systematic losses in tree-canopy cover over three decades revealed by integrating complementary data sources
Published: 2023-11-02
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability
Losses and gains in canopy cover of the world’s tree canopies affect carbon stocks, species habitats, water cycles, and human livelihoods. Consistent and multi-decadal global data on tree-canopy cover dynamics are needed for modelling climate scenarios, tracking progress towards restoration targets, and diverse other research, management and policy applications. However, most data only map binary [...]
A Portable low-cost Device to Quantify Advective Gas Fluxes from Mofettes into the Lower Atmosphere: First Application to Starzach Mofettes (Germany)
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In this study, we introduce a portable low-cost device for in situ gas emission measurement from focused point sources of CO2, such as mofettes. We assess the individual sensors' precision with calibration experiments and perform an independent verification of the system's ability to measure gas flow rates in the range of liters per second. The results from one week of continuous CO2 flow [...]
Pacific shoreline erosion and accretion patterns controlled by El Niño/Southern Oscillation
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In the Pacific Basin, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual climate variability, driving substantial changes in oceanographic forcing and impacting Pacific coastlines. Yet, how sandy coasts respond to these basin-scale changes has to date been limited to a few long-term beach monitoring sites, predominantly on developed coasts. Here we use 38 years of Landsat [...]
Pygoda: a graphical interface to efficiently visualise and explore large sets of geolocated time series
Published: 2023-10-24
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Climate, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Fresh Water Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Hydrology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Statistics and Probability, Spatial Science
Modern-day data sets in geosciences may comprise hundreds or thousands of geolocated time series. Despite all the automated tools and new algorithms now available to process and prepare those data before using them in research projects, it can be useful or even necessary to visualise and investigate them manually. Whether it be for data quality assessment, for the preparation of a training data [...]