Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
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, [...]
Seafloor shaping in mesophotic reefs, role of internal waves and bottom currents (Southeastern Mediterranean Sea)
Published: 2023-01-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Marine Biology, Other Environmental Sciences, Sedimentology
Mesophotic reefs are located in low light conditions which, depending on the region, found in water depths greater than ~30 m. They are less affected by ocean warming than reefs found in shallower water depth and thus might become increasingly important for the sustainability of marine biodiversity. Here we explore the physical mechanisms controlling the sediment distribution around a [...]
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 [...]
Locating Flowing Conduits in Karst Using Amplitude-based Passive Seismic Location Method
Published: 2022-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The aim of this study is to develop methods for directly detecting energetic groundwater flow in sub-surface conduits through passive seismic applications, by detecting the small ground vibrations (seismic microtremor) that flowing water in the sub-surface may generate. This is in contrast to the current ‘traditional’ approach of attempting to actively image the conduits using geophysical and [...]
Köppen meets Neural Network: Revision of the Köppen Climate Classification by Neural Networks
Published: 2022-08-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Categorical Data Analysis, Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Multivariate Analysis
Climate change and development of data-oriented methods are appealing for new climate classification schemes. Based on the most widely used Köppen-Geiger scheme, this article proposes a neural network based climate classification method from a data science perspective. In conventional schemes, empirically handcrafted rules are used to divide climate data into climate types, resulting in certain [...]
Improved estimation of phytoplankton abundance and fine-scale water quality features via simultaneous discrete and semi-continuous surveys
Published: 2022-08-06
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography, Water Resource Management
The abundance and distribution of phytoplankton is driven by light and nutrient availability which in turn is controlled by larger-scale regional processes such as climatic variability and global teleconnections. However, such estimates are largely built on evidence gathered from coarse (on the order of kilometers), discrete grab sampling networks where the overall set of measured parameters is [...]
Hybrid Machine Learning for Integrating Pedological Knowledge into Digital Soil Mapping to Advance Next-Generation Earth System Models
Published: 2022-07-22
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Soil Science, Statistical Models
Land surface and Earth System models require reliable soil maps to represent the influence of spatial variability of soil properties on ecosystem fluxes and storages. However, mapping soils using conventional in situ survey protocols is time-consuming and costly. We addressed the outdated spatial information on soil physico-chemical properties for a tropical region with a ~700-km longitudinal [...]