Preprints
There are 5516 Preprints listed.
A Hybrid Pore-Network-Continuum Modeling Framework for Flow and Transport in 3D Digital Images of Porous Media
Published: 2023-12-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Understanding flow and transport in multiscale porous media is challenging due to the presence of a wide range of pore sizes. Recent imaging advances offer high-resolution characterization of the multiscale pore structures. However, simulating flow and transport in 3D digital images requires models to represent both the resolved and sub-resolution pore structures. Here, we develop a hybrid [...]
On the economic feasibility of tidal range power plants
Published: 2023-12-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
The wave potential energy associated with tides presents a promising sustainable energy resource. Uncertainties on the economic case of tidal range power plants are a known bottleneck hindering the development of the industry. Significant costs depend on each design's general arrangement, which includes both mechanical components and the associated civil works. Research on tidal range structures [...]
Assessing recent thaw and subsidence of peatland permafrost in coastal Labrador, northeastern Canada
Published: 2023-12-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ground temperatures have been monitored since 2014 in four shallow boreholes (up to 5.7 m deep) drilled in palsas along the southeastern Labrador Sea coastline. This borehole network is critical for monitoring the effects of climate change on the terrestrial cryosphere and includes some of the southernmost coastal permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere. In this region, there are very few published [...]
Untangling intercropping in heterogeneous smallholder maize-cassava farming systems with remote sensing
Published: 2023-12-15
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earth observation approaches for large-scale crop monocultures are often not transferable to heterogeneous smallholder systems. Key challenges in this regard are intercropping, high intra-field crop type variability, wide sowing windows, presence of non-crop vegetation and small but variable field sizes. Currently, studies on smallholder agriculture mainly focus on specific crops and seldom [...]
Transdisciplinary doctoral training to address global sustainability challenges
Published: 2023-12-14
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Amplified seasonality in western Europe in a warmer world
Published: 2023-12-11
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Documenting the seasonal temperature cycle constitutes an essential step towards mitigating risks associated with extreme weather events in a future warmer world. The mid-Piacenzian Warm Period (mPWP), 3.3 – 3.0 million years ago, featured global temperatures approximately 3°C above pre-industrial levels. It represents an ideal period for directed paleoclimate reconstructions equivalent to model [...]
Sensitivity Analysis of Global Kinematics on Mantle Structure Using Automatically Generated Adjoint Thermochemical Convection Codes
Published: 2023-12-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Tectonics and Structure
Within the past 30 years, numerical models of mantle convection have been able to predict observations on Earth and planets, and among them tectonics. The possibility of building inverse problems in global geodynamics became concrete, and often involve the development of adjoint codes. Such tools provide efficient ways to estimate sensitivities of misfit functions relative to control parameters, [...]
GEE-PICX: Generating cloud-free Sentinel-2 and Landsat image composites and spectral indices for custom areas and time frames - a Google Earth Engine web application
Published: 2023-12-11
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Earth observation satellites are collecting vast amounts of free and openly accessible data with immense potential to support environmental, economic, and social fields. As the availability of remotely sensed data increases, so do the methods for accessing and processing it. Many solutions exist for creating cloud-free image composites from often cloudy satellite data, but these typically require [...]
MultiRS Flood Mapper: A Google Earth Engine Application for Water Extent Mapping with Multimodal Remote Sensing and Quantile-Based Postprocessing
Published: 2023-12-11
Subjects: Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Remote Sensing (RS) imagery is an important data source in surface water mapping applications thanks to its high spatial and temporal consistency and scalability. The introduction of Google Earth Engine (GEE) has cleared some of the major barriers of fast and large-scale RS-based geospatial analyses by providing easy and open access to most of the commonly used RS image products as well as [...]
FootNet v1.0: Development of a machine learning emulator of atmospheric transport
Published: 2023-12-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring
There has been a proliferation of dense observing systems to monitor greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations over the past decade. Estimating emissions with these observations is often done using an atmospheric transport model to characterize the source-receptor relationship, which is commonly termed measurement "footprint". Computing and storing footprints using full-physics models is becoming [...]
Comprehensive review of the annual haze episode in Northern Thailand
Published: 2023-12-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Public Health
The mountainous part of northern Thailand is subject to an intense haze episode occurring almost every year between January and May. In the last couple of decades, this atmospheric phenomenon has been extensively covered in the media and is now a main concern for the population living in this area. In this review, we synthesized the information available from hundreds of publications on air [...]
Plio-Pleistocene evolution of westerly moisture transport into the northern tropical Andes
Published: 2023-12-09
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Westerly winds from the eastern equatorial Pacific direct moisture into the Western Cordillera of the northern tropical Andes, where subsequent orographic lifting creates the wettest regions in the world. The Choco low-level jet is emblematic of broader westerly winds in this region and is projected to weaken by the end of the 21st century, but climate models show considerable disagreement about [...]
Will the ‘Anthropocene’ finally be formalized?
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Geology, Stratigraphy
A proposal for the formalization of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch following the Holocene has just been submitted (31 October 2023) to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). This proposal, prepared by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) after 13 years of discussions, places the beginning of the ‘Anthropocene’ in the mid-20th century, and considers that the [...]
Salt Precipitation during Geological CO2 Storage: Effect of Access to Continuous Brine Source
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences
During CO2 storage, the near-wellbore environment experiences significant chemical, physical, thermal, and mechanical perturbations. Therefore, it is crucial to characterize the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical (THMC) processes in this region through representative experimental tests and numerical simulations to maximize the safety and cost-efficiency of CO2 storage. One common [...]
Overview of the MOSAiC expedition: Ecosystem
Published: 2023-12-08
Subjects: Marine Biology, Oceanography
An international and interdisciplinary sea ice drift expedition, the ‘The Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate‘ (MOSAiC), was conducted from October 2019 to September 2020. The aim of MOSAiC was to study the interconnected physical, chemical and biological characteristics and processes from the atmosphere to the deep sea of the central Arctic system. The [...]