Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
High-resolution methane mapping with the EnMAP satellite imaging spectroscopy mission
Published: 2023-04-05
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring
Methane mitigation from anthropogenic sources such as fossil fuels and waste management has been found as one of the most promising strategies to curb global warming in the near future. Satellite-based imaging spectrometers have demonstrated to be well-suited to detect and quantify these emissions at high spatial resolution. These instruments produce so-called hyperspectral data cubes of the [...]
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 [...]
Addressing Tidal Flooding Induced uncertainties in Satellite Derived Global Salt Marsh Change Studies: Impact on Blue Carbon Monitoring
Published: 2023-03-04
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Other Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
In the past few years, it has been established that remote sensing of wetlands change analysis studies would require careful examination of tidal flooding produced uncertainties in satellite datasets. Tide flagging and filtering mechanisms are required to reduce per-pixel variabilities and errors in change detection. We present a technical note summarizing the potential impact of a lack of tide [...]
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, [...]
Internal waves and bottom currents interactions around mesophotic reefs, southeastern Mediterranean
Published: 2023-01-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Marine Biology, Other Environmental Sciences, Sedimentology
Mesophotic reefs are found in water depths greater than 30m and as such are, for the most part, removed from most direct wave activity, notably in the Mediterranean Sea. There, they are protected from anthropogenic impact and serve as a possible refuge for marine biodiversity in a warming ocean. Yet, like any reef, their growth is modulated by the distribution of the sediment they produce and [...]
Extension of Methane Emission Rate Distribution for Permian Basin Oil and Gas Production Infrastructure by Aerial LiDAR
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Aerial LiDAR measurements at 7474 oil and gas production facilities in the Permian Basin yield a measured methane emission rate distribution extending to the detection sensitivity of the method, 2 kg/h at 90% probability of detection. Emissions are found at 38.3% of facilities scanned, a significantly higher proportion than reported in lower-sensitivity campaigns. LiDAR measurements are analyzed [...]
Improving Shoreline Forecasting Models with Multi-Objective Genetic Programming
Published: 2023-01-10
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography, Sedimentology, Statistical Models
Given the current context of climate change and increasing population densities at coastal zones, there is an increasing need to be able to predict the development of our coasts. Recent advances in artificial intelligence allow for automatic analysis of observational data. This work makes use of Symbolic Regression, a type of Machine Learning algorithm, to evolve interpretable shoreline [...]
Wildfire influence on recent US pollution trends
Published: 2022-12-16
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies
Steady improvements in ambient air quality in the US over the past several decades have led to large public health benefits. However, recent trends in PM2.5 concentrations, a key pollutant, have stagnated or begun to reverse throughout much of the US. We quantify the contribution of wildfire smoke to these trends and find that since 2016, wildfire smoke has significantly slowed or reversed [...]
Contemporary and historical detection of small lakes using cross-sensor super resolution Landsat imagery
Published: 2022-11-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
Landsat is the longest-running environmental satellite program and has been used for surface water mapping of large water bodies since its launch in 1972. Remote sensing image resolution is increasingly being enhanced through single image super resolution (SR), a machine learning task typically performed by neural networks. Here, we show that a 10x SR model (Enhanced Super Resolution GAN, or [...]
The unknown fate of macroplastic in mountain rivers
Published: 2022-11-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Water Resource Management
Mountain rivers are typically seen as relatively pristine ecosystems, supporting numerous goods (e.g., water resources) for human populations living not only in the mountain regions but also downstream from them. Recent evidence suggests, however, that mountain river valleys in populated areas can be substantially polluted by macroplastic (plastic item > 5 mm). It is, however, unknown how [...]
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 [...]
Seasonally-decomposed Sentinel-1 backscatter time-series are useful indicators of peatland wildfire vulnerability
Published: 2022-10-22
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Environmental Sciences
Peatlands throughout the boreal forest are expected to experience changes in precipitation, evapotranspiration and temperature due to climate change. Correspondingly, changes in hydrologic regimes could lead to increased drought and occurrence of wildfire. Fire management agencies require information about near-real time wildfire vulnerability in boreal peatlands. Remote sensing tools (e.g., [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]