Preprints
There are 6345 Preprints listed.
On the modulation of kinetic energy transfer by internal gravity waves
Published: 2022-01-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding how kinetic energy (KE) is exchanged across scales and eventually dissipated remains a key question in physical oceanography. Recent theoretical works suggests that both quasi-balanced submesoscale motions and internal gravity waves (IGWs) could play a role in fluxing KE towards dissipation. How these classes of motions actually provide a route to dissipation in the ocean is still [...]
Frontier metrics for a process-based understanding of deforestation dynamics
Published: 2022-01-23
Subjects: Agriculture
Agricultural expansion into tropical and subtropical forests often leads to major social-ecological trade-offs. Yet, despite ever-more detailed information on where deforestation occurs, how agriculture expands into forests remains unclear. Here, we developed and mapped a novel set of metrics that quantify agricultural frontier processes at unprecedented spatial and temporal detail. Specifically, [...]
Evaluation of changes in dry and wet precipitation extremes in warmer climates using a passive water vapor modelling approach
Published: 2022-01-21
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Hydroclimatic extremes, such as heavy daily rainfall and dry spells, are expected to intensify under anthropogenic warming. Often, these changes are diagnostically related to thermodynamic increases in humidity with warming. Here, we develop a framework that uses an on-line calculation of the thermodynamically induced changes of the full precipitation distribution with warming in an idealized [...]
Mitigating the effect of errors in source parameters on seismic (waveform) inversion
Published: 2022-01-21
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
We investigate the effect of errors in earthquake source parameters on the tomographic inverse problem and propose mitigation strategies for avoiding artefacts caused by such errors. Source errors can be quite significant: mislocation errors can amount to tens of kilometres both horizontally and vertically, while fault plane uncertainties can be of the order of tens of degrees. To analyse how [...]
Traversing the academic ladder as an early career researcher in earth and environmental sciences
Published: 2022-01-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
There is growing concern in Higher Education around job security, work-life balance and inequalities, and early career academics must make difficult trade-offs and life choices. Ample literature confirms that women navigating academia face additional challenges. Few studies have sought to connect contractual circumstances, employment priorities and their impacts on the life choices of individual [...]
Deep-water cycling and the Magmatic History of the Earth
Published: 2022-01-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Planetary Sciences
Earth is a magmatically active planet. Magmatism connects Earth's interior to its atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere through cycling of volatiles, greenhouse gasses, and nutrients. Earth's magmatic history is intertwined with its thermal and tectonic evolution. How magmatism has evolved and been maintained in the face of planetary cooling remains an open question. We address this question [...]
Bayesian differential moment tensor inversion: theory and application to the North Korea nuclear tests
Published: 2022-01-20
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Moment tensors are key to seismic discrimination but often require accurate Green’s functions for estimation. This limits the regions, frequency bands, and wave types in moment tensor inversions. In this study, we propose a differential moment tensor inversion (diffMT) method that uses relative measurements to remove the path effects shared by clustered events, thereby improving the accuracy of [...]
A Comparison of Methods for Assessing Groundwater Flooding Due to Sea Level Rise
Published: 2022-01-19
Subjects: Hydrology
This technical note compares two groundwater flooding assessments for a site on the Rockaway Peninsula of New York City, a coastal barrier island subject to several climate change risks including groundwater flooding. One assessment was performed using a MODFLOW groundwater model while the other used an interpolated water table map constructed in GIS. The two methods showed minor differences in [...]
Frequency-Difference Backprojection of Earthquakes
Published: 2022-01-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Back-projection has proven useful in imaging large earthquake rupture processes. The method is generally robust and does not require many assumptions about the fault geometry or the Earth velocity model. It can be applied in both the time and frequency domain. However, back-projection images are often obtained from records filtered in a narrow frequency range, limiting our ability to uncover the [...]
No unique scaling law for igneous dikes
Published: 2022-01-19
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM), veins, dikes, and sills grow in length when the stress intensity factor [K_I] at the tip reaches a critical value: the host rock fracture toughness [K_Ic]. This criterion is applied broadly in LEFM models for crack growth and assumes that the pressure inside the crack is uniform. When applied to intrusion length versus thickness scaling, a significant [...]
On Strictly Enforced Mass Conservation Constraints for Modeling the Rainfall-Runoff Process
Published: 2022-01-19
Subjects: Hydrology
It has been proposed that conservation laws might not be beneficial for accurate hydrological modeling due to errors in input (precipitation) and target (streamflow) data (particularly at the event time scale), and this might explain why deep learning models (which are not based on enforcing closure) can out-perform catchment-scale conceptual and process-based models at predicting streamflow. We [...]
Subsurface Flow Batteries: Concept, Benefits and Hurdles
Published: 2022-01-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Storage of flow-battery electrolytes in aquifers is a novel concept for storing electrical energy in the subsurface. Flow-batteries operate by electrochemical transformations of electrolytes, rather than of electrodes, and their energy capacity can therefore be increased indefinitely by using larger electrolyte tanks. Saline aquifers may be the cheapest way to provide large-scale storage for this [...]
Phanerozoic sedimentary cover history of the Hudson Platform: a heuristic modeling perspective
Published: 2022-01-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Stratigraphy, Tectonics and Structure
Understanding the long-term erosion and burial history of cratons is challenging due to the incompleteness of the rock record. Here we present a study involving laser ablation apatite fission-track dating of three Canadian Shield basement samples collected adjacent to the Ordovician nonconformity on the Hudson Platform. Compared to a conventional analysis, our samples are characterized by up to [...]
Thermal evolution of rocky exoplanets with a graphite outer shell
Published: 2022-01-18
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Planetary Sciences
The presence of rocky exoplanets with a large refractory carbon inventory is predicted by chemical evolution models of protoplanetary disks of stars with photospheric C/O >0.65, and by models studying the radial transport of refractory carbon. High-pressure high-temperature laboratory experiments show that most of the carbon in these exoplanets differentiates into a graphite outer shell. Our aim [...]
A discontinuous Galerkin method for sequences of earthquakes and aseismic slip on multiple faults using unstructured curvilinear grids
Published: 2022-01-18
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Physics-based simulations provide a path to overcome the lack of observational data which is hampering a holistic understanding of earthquake faulting and crustal deformation across the vastly varying space-time scales governing the seismic cycle. However, simulations of sequences of earthquakes and aseismic slip (SEAS) including more than one fault, complex geometries, and elastic [...]