Preprints
There are 4713 Preprints listed.
Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous orogenesis in the Klamath Mountains Province (northern California-southern Oregon) occurred by tectonic switching: Insights from Detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology of the Condrey Mountain schist
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
The Klamath Mountains province (KMP) of northern California and southern Oregon consists of generally east-dipping terranes assembled via Paleozoic to Mesozoic subduction along the western margin of North America. The KMP more than doubled in mass from Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous time, due to alternating episodes of extension (e.g, rifting and formation of the Josephine ophiolite) and [...]
Mineral precipitation and geometry alteration in porous structures: How to upscale variations in permeability-porosity relationship?
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Porous materials in natural and engineered environments are subject to morphological changes resulting from interacting chemical and physical processes. The complexity of coupled flow, transport, and chemical processes that occur on different temporal and spatial scales makes it difficult to predict the resulting porosity and permeability alterations. Delineating the controls of mineral [...]
Comparative Analysis of Monetary Transaction Cost of Human-Wildlife Conflict in Mt. Kenya and Amboseli Ecosystems, Kenya
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Biodiversity
Historically, HWC has been reported in the form of crop raiding, livestock predation, property damage, human attacks, disease transmission and ignored hidden costs (HC) such as compensation transaction costs. The HC of HWC are costs that are uncompensated, temporally delayed, or of psychosocial nature. HC of HWC are not recognised in Kenya’s Wildlife Conservation and Management Act (WCMA) 2013 [...]
Human Civilization will Collapse (High Confidence): A Compendium of Relevant Biophysical, Political, Economic, Military, Health, and Psychological Information on Climate Change
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human civilization will not collapse from the direct effects of climate change, but rather from the secondary effects of crop failures, infectious diseases, and armed conflict. The root cause of the climate crisis is the earth’s energy imbalance: more energy is arriving at the earth from the sun than is being radiated back out into space. This is occurring because we have been [...]
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 [...]
Empowering the Next-Generation Climate Scientists: Insights from the 2023 Forecasters’ WEB (ForWEB) Exchange Program/Hackathon at KNUST, Ghana
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In response to the escalating climate change issues, the Forecasters' WEB (ForWEB), established by the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science, KNUST, collaborated with the Department of Atmospheric and Climate Science, UENR to host the first, exchange program/hackathon. The program aimed at equipping students with knowledge, practical skills, and a collaborative ethos for addressing the [...]
Land transformation on multi-decadal timescales reveals expanding croplands and settlements at the expense of tree-covered areas and mangroves in Nigeria
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Evaluating how land-cover is being transformed is essential to identify patterns necessary to infer the change trajectories and the driving factors. This study considers the case of Nigeria, where various natural ecosystems are being converted and for which a current national scale assessment is lacking. Producing Landsat-based time-series, we analyze change among land-cover types (i.e., [...]
2D and 3D imaging of ‘tunnel-shaped’ weathering features in soil grains: a biological origin?
Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The evolution of the first plant-based terrestrial ecosystems some ~450 million years ago had a profound effect on the development of soils and shifts in global biogeochemical cycles, notably drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere. In some part these shifts were due to biologically mediated weathering of mineral grains, which until plants evolved, had not been a significant contributor to [...]
A Review of Geological and Climatic Variables in Groundwater Availability Prediction in Africa: Machine Learning Approaches
Published: 2024-01-07
Subjects: Engineering
Groundwater is crucial for Africa's potable water supply, agriculture, and economic development. However, the continent faces challenges with groundwater scarcity due to factors like population growth, climate change, and over exploitation. Over the past ten years, machine learning has been increasingly and successfully used in groundwater level prediction across the world. This review paper [...]
Machine-Learning Approaches for Assessing Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) in Ghana, West Africa
Published: 2024-01-07
Subjects: Education, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In the field of environmental health, assessing air pollution exposure has historically posed challenges, primarily due to sparse ground observation networks. To overcome this limitation, satellite remote sensing of aerosols provides a valuable tool for monitoring air quality and estimating particulate matter concentration (PM) at the surface. In this study, we employ two predictive models to [...]
Designing and describing climate change impact attribution studies: a guide to common approaches
Published: 2024-01-06
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Public Health, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Impact attribution is an emerging transdisciplinary sub-discipline of detection and attribution, focused on the social, economic, and ecological impacts of climate change. Here, we provide an overview of common end-to-end frameworks in impact attribution, focusing on examples relating to the human health impacts of climate change. We propose a typology of study designs based on whether [...]
Hydrogen wettability and capillary pressure in Clashach sandstone for underground hydrogen storage
Published: 2024-01-05
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Hydrogen (H2) can support the transition to net-zero carbon (C) emissions by facilitating increased renewable energy use by acting as an energy store to balance supply and demand. Underground H2 storage in porous media is investigated due to its high capacity and economical price. An important unknown in underground porous media H2 storage is the volume of recoverable H2 which is partly [...]
Megathrust locking encoded in subduction landscapes
Published: 2024-01-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Locked areas of subduction megathrusts are increasingly found to coincide with landscape features sculpted over hundreds of kyrs, yet the mechanisms that underlie such correlations remain elusive. We show that interseismic locking gradients induce increments of irreversible strain across the overriding plate manifested predominantly as distributed seismicity. Summing these increments over [...]
Aggregation - Disaggregation Cycles in ERA 5 Reanalysis
Published: 2024-01-04
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding convective aggregation is very important for understanding tropical climate and climate sensitivity. However, we still lack a full understanding of how aggregation evolves in the real world or what phenomena and scales are analogous to the self-aggregation observed in idealized models. In this study, we apply the moist static energy (MSE) variance budget framework to ERA5 reanalysis [...]
Inverse modeling of satellite observations shows that the wet tropics drive the 2010-2022 methane increase
Published: 2024-01-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Atmospheric methane concentrations rose rapidly over the past decade and surged in 2020-2022 but the causes are unclear. We find from inverse analysis of GOSAT satellite observations that global methane emissions increased from 500 to 550 Tg a-1 from 2010 to 2019 and surged to 570-590 Tg a-1 in 2020-2022. Concentrations of tropospheric OH (the main methane sink) show no long-term trend over [...]