Preprints
There are 6259 Preprints listed.
Operationalizing accessibility in environmental sustainability efforts: Challenges, barriers, and opportunities
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Environmental Studies
There is growing recognition of the need to move towards climate justice in response to the climate crisis; that is, ensuring mitigation and adaptation responses centre equity, and promote the inclusion of marginalized or otherwise ‘equity-deserving’ groups, including people with disabilities. Despite this recognition, there is little empirical research exploring the intersection of disability in [...]
End-to-End Deployment of the Educational AI Hub for Personalized Learning and Engagement: A Case Study on Environmental Science Education
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Engineering Education
This study introduces an end-to-end framework for deploying conversational AI-enabled educational assistants, focusing on personalized support for students across diverse subject areas, including Business, Culture, Environmental Sciences, History, Politics, and Science, as outlined in our evaluation framework. The system leverages advanced conversational AI technologies to provide targeted, [...]
Decision-making under flood predictions: a risk perception study of coastal real estate
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Flood models, while representing our best knowledge of a natural phenomenon, are continually evolving. Their predictions, albeit undeniably important for flood risk management, contain considerable uncertainties related to model structure, parameterisation, and input data. With multiple sources of flood predictions becoming increasingly available through online flood maps, the uncertainties in [...]
Evolution of the Spatial Pattern of Manufacturing Innovation Capacity and Influencing Factors in the Yangtze River Delta Region
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Higher Education
This paper aims to reveal the temporal and spatial evolution characteristics and influencing factors of manufacturing innovation capacity in the Yangtze River Delta region, providing empirical references for formulating regional manufacturing innovation center layout policies. Using the number of patents granted in the manufacturing industry to represent manufacturing innovation capacity, [...]
Numerical Investigation of Energy Dissipation and Hydraulic Performance of Slotted Roller Buckets with a Different Teeth Configuration
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Engineering
Larger and Steadier Warming since 1850 from Harmonized Land and Ocean Temperature Records
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate historical temperature estimates are crucial for understanding current warming levels and informing policy decisions. Trends in global land and ocean temperatures diverge, however, before 1945. Inter-calibration of coastal land-ocean temperatures indicates that this divergence arises from under-corrected biases in sea-surface temperature linked to late 19th century instrumentation [...]
MicroCrystalNet: An Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Microcrystal Classification using Scanning Electron Microscope Petrography
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Engineering, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences
Morphological characterization of microcrystalline rock textures typically relies upon the visual interpretation and manual measurement of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imagery: a practice fraught with subjectivity, inefficiency, sampling bias, and data loss. We introduce a state-of-the-art computer vision pipeline, built on deep learning architectures, for segmenting and classifying [...]
Large-scale controls on intensity-duration characteristics of heatwaves in an idealised model
Published: 2024-08-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
The relationship between the large-scale structure of the atmospheric circulation and the mean intensity and duration of heatwaves is studied in an idealised climate model. Using the tight relationship between near-surface temperature and lower tropospheric dry static energy (DSE) in the model, we study the energetics of the lower troposphere during heatwaves in the model. This analysis leads to [...]
An Integrated Framework for Actionable Flood Warnings on Road Structures Using High Resolution Satellite Imagery
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
Floods rank among the most devastating natural hazards globally. Unlike many other natural calamities, floods typically occur in densely populated regions, resulting in immediate and long-term adverse impacts on communities, including fatalities, injuries, health risks, and significant economic and environmental losses annually. Traditional flood models, while useful, are constrained by [...]
The Effect of Rayleigh-Love Coupling in an Anisotropic Medium
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
For a weakly anisotropic medium, Rayleigh and Love wave phase speeds at angular frequency $\omega$ and propagation azimuth $\psi$ are given approximately by $V(\omega,\psi) = A_0 + A_{2c} \cos 2 \psi + A_{2s} \sin 2 \psi + A_{4c} \cos 4 \psi + A_{4s} \sin 4 \psi$. Earlier theories of the propagation of surface waves in anisotropic media based on non-degenerate perturbation theory predict that the [...]
Considerations for CO2 storage in deep saline aquifers in tectonically active regions with implications for the Lower Mainland British Columbia (LMBC)
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Engineering
Underground geological storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) has emerged as one of the most viable solutions for mitigating global carbon emissions during the transition to a net-zero economy. Within subsurface geological strata, saline aquifers and depleted oil and gas reservoirs are the primary targets for CO2 storage. However, in regions with limited oil and gas production operations, underground [...]
Spatial Variability of Water Temperature within the White River Basin, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington
Published: 2024-08-16
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Water temperature is a primary control on the occurrence and distribution of cold-water species. Rivers draining Mount Rainier in western Washington, including the White River along its northern flank, support several cold-water fish populations, but the spatial distribution of water temperatures, particularly during late-summer base flow between August and September, and the climatic, [...]
3-DOF Simulation of Hypothetical Crew Vehicle Launch into Low Mars Orbit
Published: 2024-08-14
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Engineering, Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics
A major challenge in space exploration has been the return of a vehicle from the surface of Mars to Earth. This problem has proven to be quite difficult, with current plans to return small rock samples turning out to be too expensive and time consuming[1]. If humans are ever to explore the surface of the red planet, a practical way to launch a crew from the surface of Mars into an orbit from [...]
Partial ruptures governed by the complex interplay between geodetic slip deficit, rigidity, and pore fluid pressure in 3D Cascadia dynamic rupture simulations
Published: 2024-08-14
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Physics-based simulations are crucial to assessing the seismic hazard in the Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ), requiring assumptions about fault stress and material properties. Geodetic slip deficit models (SDMs) may inform the initial stresses governing megathrust earthquake dynamics. We present a unified workflow linking SDMs to 3D dynamic rupture simulations, and 22 rupture scenarios to unravel [...]
Reduced contribution of sulfur to the mass extinction associated with the Chicxulub impact event
Published: 2024-08-14
Subjects: Planetary Sciences
The Chicxulub asteroid impact event at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary ~66 Myr ago is widely considered responsible for the mass extinction event leading to the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs. Short-term cooling due to massive release of climate-active agents is hypothesized to have been crucial, with S-bearing gases originating from the target rock vaporization considered a main [...]