Preprints
There are 4713 Preprints listed.
Large indirect economic impacts of tropical cyclones shaped by disaster response
Published: 2024-05-30
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Tropical cyclones (TCs) have direct economic impacts, destroying property, crops, and infrastructure. However, the sign and magnitude of their indirect impacts via longer-term changes in economic output remain unclear. Here we use data on TC winds and county-level income in the U.S. to quantify the indirect impacts of TCs on incomes in the years following a TC. We find a nonlinear response of [...]
HarvestGRID: High-resolution harvested crop areas of the United States from 1981 to 2019
Published: 2024-05-29
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Life Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The United States is a major producer and exporter of agricultural goods, fulfilling global demands for food, fiber, and fuel while generating substantial economic benefits. Agriculture in the U.S. not only dominates land use but also ranks as the largest water-consuming sector. High-resolution cropland mapping and insights into cultivation trends are essential to enhance sustainable management [...]
Ringing mountain ranges: Teleseismic signature of the interaction of high-frequency wavefields with near-source topography at the Degelen nuclear test site
Published: 2024-05-26
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Over the last decade there has been an international effort to find methods to recover and digitize recordings from historical earthquakes and explosions that occurred during the 1950’s through to the 1980’s. Making these recordings accessible in digital format offers opportunities to study what signatures are encoded in the data, and to apply state-of-the-art techniques and methods to historical [...]
Local water year values for the conterminous United States
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Water Resource Management
Quantifying and predicting precipitation and its influence on ecosystems is challenged by the asynchrony between precipitation and water fluxes. To account for this asynchrony, scientists and managers use “water year” to estimate precipitation and its impacts on water flow and ecosystems. However, traditional water year definitions either do not consider areal variation in climate and hydrology [...]
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models in Hydrological Applications
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable advancements, achieving a level of intelligence comparable to human capabilities. In this study, we conduct an analysis of the latest Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), specifically Multimodal-GPT, GPT-4 Vision, Gemini and LLaVa, focusing on their application in the hydrology domain. The hydrology domain holds [...]
Rising temperatures drive lower summer minimum flows across hydrologically diverse catchments
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Excessively low stream flows harm ecosystems and societies, so two key goals of low-flow hydrology are to understand their drivers and to predict their severity and frequency. We show that simple linear regressions can accomplish both goals across diverse catchments. We analyse 230 unregulated moderate to high relief catchments across rainfall-dominated, hybrid, snowmelt-dominated, and glacial [...]
Can We Reverse Global Warming?
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Without mitigation, Climate Change is expected to costs large amounts of money, cause vast amounts of human suffering and death and threatens the survival of countless species. Rising global temperatures alone are expected to cause a drop in GDP of 30 – 70% for many countries with already high temperatures. In combination with other factors (population growth, increasing water stress, coastal [...]
Savings and Avoided Costs of Living Carbon Negative
Published: 2024-05-25
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In order to prevent the biodiversity losses anticipated under business-as-usual (BAU) conditions, and to prevent the associated enormous financial and human losses, the world has to transition to carbon negative economies, where for decades more CO2 will be sequestered than emitted. To abate and possibly reverse global warming, we need to both transition from fossil fuels to renewables (mainly [...]
Randomization of the Earth's magnetic field driven by magnetic helicty
Published: 2024-05-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
It is shown, using results of numerical simulations and geomagnetic observations, that the spatial and temporal randomization of the Earth's global and local magnetic fields is driven by magnetic helicity (ideal magnetohydrodynamic invariant). In the frames of the distributed chaos notion, the magnetic helicity determines the degree of magnetic field randomization and the results of numerical [...]
River Morphology Information System: A Web Cyberinfrastructure for Advancing River Morphology Research
Published: 2024-05-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Databases and Information Systems, Geographic Information Sciences, Software Engineering
The study and management of river systems are increasingly challenged by the complexity and volume of data required to understand and predict river morphology changes. The River Morphology Information System (RIMORPHIS) is introduced as a transformative solution to these challenges, serving as an open-access web-based cyberinfrastructure designed to enable advanced research in river morphology [...]
Predictable recovery rates in near-surface materials after earthquake damage
Published: 2024-05-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earthquakes introduce transient mechanical damage in the subsurface, which causes postseismic hazards and can take years to recover. This observation has been linked to relaxation, a phenomenon observed in a wide class of materials after straining perturbations, but its duration after earthquake ground shaking has not been constrained. Here, we analyse the effects of two successive large [...]
On the Origin of Holocene Sea-Level Transgressions in Formerly Glaciated Regions
Published: 2024-05-23
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Over glacial cycles, the growing and shrinking of ice sheets has caused relative sea level (RSL) to differ from global mean sea level (GMSL) due to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), which depends on the viscoelastic properties of the solid Earth. During the last termination and through the Holocene, GIA-related isostatic uplift caused RSL to fall in regions formerly covered by ice sheets. [...]
Application of the Image Processing Method and the Beer-Lambert Law for Assessing Sea Water Intrusion
Published: 2024-05-22
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper presents an innovative approach integrating the Image Processing Method and the Beer-Lambert Law to study Sea Water Intrusion in riverine systems. Using an experimental setup, this study characterizes the dynamics between saline and fresh waters, providing detailed spatial and temporal salinity distribution analyses. The Beer-Lambert Law is employed to convert image pixel data to [...]
Spatial Patterns of Urban Heat Islands and Green Space Cooling Effects in the Urban Microclimate of Karachi
Published: 2024-05-22
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
With rapid urbanization and the increasing threats of climate change, metropolitan cities like Karachi, Pakistan, are encountering greater challenges due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon. Understanding the cooling potential of urban green spaces (UGS) is crucial for mitigating heat stress and enhancing urban resilience. This study aims to analyze the thermal dynamics and cooling efficacy [...]
Experimental evaluation of two-layer air bubble curtains to prevent seawater intrusion into rivers
Published: 2024-05-21
Subjects: Engineering
The seawater intrusion (SWI) into rivers can lead to many negative consequences, especially on agricultural activities and live ecosystems in upstream areas of rivers. One solution to prevent SWI is using air bubble curtains (ABCs). The objective of this study is to investigate the optimal location of ABCs and airflows. To this end, several tests with different flow and salinity rates were [...]