Preprints
There are 4725 Preprints listed.
The perpetual fragility of creeping hillslopes
Published: 2020-05-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Soil-mantled hillslopes owe their smooth, convex shape to creep; the slow and persistent, gravity-driven motion of grains on slopes below the angle of repose. Existing models presume that soil creep occurs via mechanical displacement of grains by (bio)physical disturbances. Recent simulations, however, suggest that soil can creep without these disturbances, due to internal relaxation dynamics [...]
Human Health Benefits of the Minamata Convention on Mercury
Published: 2020-05-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Minamata Convention is a legally-binding international treaty aimed at reducing the anthropogenic release of mercury, a potent neurotoxin. However, its human health benefit has not been quantified on a global scale. Here we evaluate the Convention’s benefit by a coupled climate-atmosphere-land-ocean-ecosystem model and a human mercury exposure component that considers all food categories. We [...]
Probabilistic soil moisture dynamics of water- and energy-limited ecosystems
Published: 2020-05-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
This paper presents an extension of the stochastic ecohydrological model for soil moisture dynamics at a point of Rodriguez-Iturbe et al. (1999) and Laio et al. (2001). In the original model, evapotranspiration is a function of soil moisture and vegetation parameters, so that the model is suitable for water-limited environments. Our extension introduces a dependence on maximum evapotranspiration [...]
Influence of Minibasin Obstruction on Canopy Dynamics in the northern Gulf of Mexico
Published: 2020-05-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
In salt-detached gravity-gliding/spreading systems the detachment geometry is a key control on the downslope mobility of the supra-salt sequence. Here we used regional 3D seismic data to examine a salt-stock canopy in the northern Gulf of Mexico slope, in an area where supra-canopy minibasins subsided vertically and translated downslope above a complex base-of-salt. If thick enough, minibasins [...]
Time-Series Prediction Approaches to Forecasting Deformation in Sentinel-1 InSAR Data
Published: 2020-05-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Time series of displacement are now routinely available from satellite InSAR and are used for flagging anomalous ground motion, but not yet for forecasting. Here we test the capabilities of conventional time series analysis and forecasting methods such as SARIMA and supervised machine learning approaches such as Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) in comparison to simple function extrapolation methods. [...]
Increasing economic drought impacts in Europe with anthropogenic warming
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
While climate change will alter the distribution in time and space of water, quantifications of drought risk in view of global warming remain little explored. Here, we show that in Europe drought damages could strongly increase with global warming and cause a strong regional imbalance in future drought impacts. In the absence of climate action (4°C in 2100 and no adaptation) annual drought losses [...]
A machine learning approach for ozone forecasting and its application for Kennewick, WA
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Chemical transport models (CTM) are widely used for air quality modeling, but these models miss forecasting some air pollution events, and require a lot of computational power. In Kennewick, WA, elevated O3 episodes can occur during the summer and early fall, but the CTM-based operational forecasting system (AIRPACT) struggles to capture them. This research used the 2015 – 2018 historical [...]
What is the hydrologically effective size of a catchment?
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Linking human activities and climate change with their consequences for water availability is a prerequisite for sustainable water management, which is traditionally performed at topographically delineated catchments. However, inter-catchment groundwater flow results in effective catchment sizes other than sizes suggested by topography. Here, we introduce the notion of effective catchment size [...]
Detecting Ground Deformation in the Built Environment using Sparse Satellite InSAR data with a Convolutional Neural Network
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Signal Processing
The large volumes of Sentinel-1 data produced over Europe are being used to develop pan-national ground motion services. However, simple analysis techniques like thresholding cannot detect and classify complex deformation signals reliably making providing usable information to a broad range of non-expert stakeholders a challenge. Here we explore the applicability of deep learning approaches by [...]
Multi-task learning based P/S wave separation and reverse time migration for VSP
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
P/S wave mode separation is an essential tool for single-mode analysis from multi-component seismic data. Wave separation methods in recorded data require expert knowledge to choose parameters in different shots of data. To make this process automatic, we propose a machine learning-based method to separate P/S waves. This method employs a multi-task neural network that extracts P- and S-potential [...]
A Near-Real-Time Approach for Monitoring Forest Disturbance Using Landsat Time Series: Stochastic Continuous Change Detection
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Forest disturbances greatly affect the ecological functioning of natural forests. Timely information regarding extent, timing and magnitude of forest disturbance events is crucial for effective disturbance management strategies. Yet, we still lack an acute, near-real-time and high-performance remote sensing tools for monitoring abrupt and subtle forest disturbances. This study presents a new [...]
Predicting the yield stress of a 3D printed porous material from its internal structure
Published: 2020-05-12
Subjects: Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Structural Materials
The design of any engineering structure requires the knowledge, and therefore determination, of the yield, i.e. limit of elasticity, for the building material. Whilst destructive experimental testing is currently necessary to do so, our work is part of initiatives which aim at deriving the yield without such laboratory experiments. The seminal work of Gurson (1977) on a simplified pore structure, [...]
Creating Geological Field Trips with the Google Earth Creation Tools
Published: 2020-05-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Instructional Media Design, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Streetcar2Subduction (https://www.agu.org/streetcar2subduction) was launched in December 2019 as a digital update and extension of the timeless 1984 classic field trip guide “Streetcar to Subduction” by Clyde Wahrhaftig . Supported by the American Geophysical Union, we were given early access to the Google Earth Creation Tools in order to build and launch several geology and tectonics field trips [...]
COVID-19-related drop in anthropogenic aerosol emissions in China and corresponding cloud and climate effects
Published: 2020-05-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to massive disruptions of public life on a global scale. To halt the spread of the disease, China temporarily shut down parts of the manufacturing and transportation sectors. Associated anthropogenic aerosol emissions in February 2020 plunged to record lows, causing a temporary improvement of air quality with uncertain effects on cloud formation, atmospheric [...]
Danger of groundwater contamination widely underestimated because of shortcuts for aquifer recharge
Published: 2020-05-11
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Groundwater pollution threatens human and ecosystem health in many areas around the globe. Shortcuts to the groundwater through concentrated recharge are known to transmit short-lived pollutants into carbonate aquifers endangering water quality of around a quarter of the world population. However, the large-scale impact of such concentrated recharge on water quality remains poorly understood. [...]