Preprints
There are 4713 Preprints listed.
Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Selected Tea Factories in Kenya
Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Tea sector is a major contributor to Kenya’s economy through foreign exchange via export. However, extensive amount of energy is required to produce one kilogram of tea, making tea processing energy-intensive. Comparing greenhouse gas emissions from different types of energy consumed in tea factories is imperative to enable policymakers make informed intervention in emission reduction. Reducing [...]
Downslope weakening of soil revealed by a rapid robotic rheometer
Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Moving down a hillslope from ridge to valley, soil develops and becomes increasingly weathered. Downslope variation in clay content, organic matter, and porosity should produce concomitant changes in soil strength that influence slope stability and erosion. This has yet to be demonstrated, however, because in-situ measurements of soil rheology are challenging and rare. Here we employ a robotic [...]
Indoor and Ambient Influences on PM2.5 Exposure and Well-being for a Rail Impacted Community and Implications for Personal Protections
Published: 2023-11-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Public Health
Background. Higher air pollution emissions can be observed near rail networks, local and highway automobile corridors, and shipyards. Communities near such sources are often disproportionately exposed to emissions from these stationary and mobile sources. One such community is West San Bernardino in California, where households are feet away from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe intermodal [...]
Variable impact of wildfire smoke on ecosystem metabolic rates in lakes
Published: 2023-11-29
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Increasingly severe wildfires release smoke plumes that cover entire continents, depositing aerosols and reducing solar radiation fluxes to millions of freshwater ecosystems, yet little is known about their impacts on inland waters. This large scale study 1) quantified annual and seasonal trends in the spatial extent of dense smoke cover in California, USA, over the last 18 years (2006 - 2022), [...]
Potential Volcanic Origin of the 2023 short-period Tsunami in the Izu Islands, Japan
Published: 2023-11-29
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
On October 8, 2023, at 21:40 UTC (6:40 on October 9 local time), a tsunami warning was declared for the Izu Islands and southwest Japan. This tsunami was initially considered to be associated with the M4.9 earthquake at 20:25 UTC (5:25 JST). However, we know events of this magnitude are far too small to generate observed tsunamis from coseismic deformation alone. In this study, we analyzed the [...]
A Compilation of Benchmark Pluvial Flood Datasets
Published: 2023-11-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology
urban pluvial flooding is a dangerous natural hazard that has become more common in recent years, making it a global threat to metropolitan areas. Surface water floods and flash floods are two common types of pluvial flooding that the second one is extremely hazardous and damaging due to both the power of the water and the debris that is frequently swept up in the flow. Buildings and their [...]
High-resolution luminescence-dated sediment record for the last two glacial-interglacial cycles from Rodderberg, Germany
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences
The Rodderberg Volcanic Complex (RVC) is well-known for the long and probably continuous climate record archived in its crater basin, which lasts for several glacial-interglacial cycles. However, a detailed chronological framework is still lacking. Here, we perform high-resolution luminescence dating on a 72.8 m-long sediment core with the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) signal from [...]
Graphics Processing Unit Assisted Computation for a Gas-Phase Chemical Solver in a Regulatory Chemical Transport Model
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering
The Earth’s atmosphere is extremely complex due to the presence of several dynamic processes, such as dispersion, diffusion, deposition, and chemical reactions. There is a pressing need to improve the predictability of air quality models by integrating more of these scientific processes with an increasing number of chemical species into the mechanisms. These enhancements degrade the computational [...]
Performance of Machine Learning for Ozone Modeling in Southern California during the COVID-19 Shutdown
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
We combine machine learning (ML) and geospatial interpolations to create two-dimensional high-resolution ozone concentration fields over the South Coast Air Basin (SoCAB) for the entire year of 2020. Three spatial interpolation methods (bicubic, IDW, and ordinary kriging) were employed. The predicted ozone concentration fields were constructed using 15 building sites predicted by the ML method, [...]
LAND-USE REQUIREMENTS OF SOLAR AND WIND POWER
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Rising shares of wind power and solar power in energy systems raises concerns over their land-use requirements (LURs) and associated impacts. Although abundant literature is available on LURs of solar and wind power, existing estimates exhibit a large variance, if not even inconsistency. This systematic review therefore evaluates published LURs for these technologies in the English scientific [...]
A Review of Measurement for Quantification of Carbon Dioxide Removal by Enhanced Weathering in Soil
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
All pathways which limit global temperature rise to <2oC above pre-industrial temperatures now require carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in addition to rapid greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Novel and durable CDR strategies need to rapidly scale over the next few decades in order to reach Paris Agreement Targets. Terrestrial enhanced weathering (EW) involves the acceleration of natural weathering [...]
UMIS: An Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System for Water Quality Resources in the Upper Mississippi River Basin
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Systems and Communications, Water Resource Management
The Upper Mississippi Information System (UMIS) is a cyberinfrastructure framework designed to support large-scale real-time water quality data integration, analysis, and visualization for the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB). UMIS is intended to directly address three of the Grand Challenges for Engineering including: 1) understanding access to clean drinking water, 2) management of the [...]
ICESat-2 and ocean particulates: Building a roadmap for calculating Kd from space-based lidar photon profiles
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences
ICESat-2’s Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) has emerged as useful tool for calculating attenuation signals in natural surface waters, thus improving our understanding of particulates from open-ocean plankton to nearshore suspended terrigenous sediments. While several studies have employed methods based on Beer’s Law to derive attenuation coefficients (including through a [...]
From Zero to Hero: How to make the Carbon Management Challenge an ambitious lever in the climate fight
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Climate, Oil, Gas, and Energy
The Carbon Management Challenge (CMC) has set a goal of reaching a minimum of 1 billion tonnes per year of geological carbon dioxide storage by 2030. While in line geological storage required in the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero pathway, there is concern this may be a distraction from the imperative of reducing fossil fuel emissions. Here we show that, if presented in terms of an [...]
Unintended consequences of nature-based solutions: Social equity and flood buyouts
Published: 2023-11-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Nature-based solutions (NbS) can serve as effective strategies to promote the resilience of both people and ecosystems in the face of climate change. However, these solutions can exacerbate existing social inequities if they fail to adequately consider the complex social contexts in which they are implemented. To better understand the equity implications of NbS, and how to design and deliver such [...]