Preprints
There are 7996 Preprints listed.
Transitioning Machine Learning from Theory to Practice in Natural Resources Management
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Agriculture, Computer Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Advances in sensing and computation have accelerated at unprecedented rates and scales, in turn creating new opportunities for natural resources managers to improve adaptive and predictive management practices by coupling large environmental datasets with machine learning (ML). Yet, to date, ML models often remain inaccessible to managers working outside of academic research. To identify [...]
Pangeo Benchmarking Analysis: Object Storage vs. POSIX File System
Published: 2020-10-21
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pangeo is a community of scientists and software developers collaborating to enable Big Data Geoscience analysis interactively in the public cloud and on high-performance computing (HPC) systems. At the core of the Pangeo software stack is (1) Xarray, which adds labels to metadata such as dimensions, coordinates and attributes for raw array-oriented data, (2) Dask, which provides parallel [...]
Relative humidity gradients as a key constraint on terrestrial water and energy fluxes
Published: 2020-10-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earth’s climate and water cycle are highly dependent on the latent heat flux (LE) associated with terrestrial evapotranspiration. While the widely-used Penman-Monteith LE model is useful to explore vegetative controls on LE, land-atmosphere interactions are difficult to interpret due to the complex role of biological controls on underlying physical processes. Here, we present a novel LE model [...]
Linking elastic and electrical properties of rocks using cross-property DEM
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering Science and Materials, Geophysics and Seismology, Materials Science and Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Joint electrical-elastic rock physics modelling can be instrumental in lowering uncertainty in subsurface reservoir characterisation. Typical electrical-elastic cross-property models, however, are empirical or require an intermediate step of porosity estimation to link a rock's electrical and elastic moduli, which can be error-prone away from well controls. Another outstanding issue in [...]
River Planform Extraction From High-Resolution SAR Images Via Generalised Gamma Distribution Superpixel Classification
Published: 2020-10-21
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology
The extraction of river planforms from remotely sensed satellite images is a task of crucial importance to many applications such as land planning, water resource monitoring or flood prediction. In this paper we present a novel framework for the extraction of rivers from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, based on superpixel segmentation and subsequent classification. Superpixel segmentation [...]
Controls on denudation along the East Australian continental margin
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We report a comprehensive inventory of Be-10-based basin-wide denudation rates (n=160) and Al-26/Be-10 ratios (n=67) from 48 drainage basins along a 3,000 km stretch of the East Australian passive continental margin. We provide data from both basins draining east of the continental divide (n=37) and discharging into the Tasman and Coral Seas, and from basins draining to the west as part of the [...]
Improving mechanical behaviour of collapsible soils by grouting active clay nanoparticles
Published: 2020-10-27
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The primary geotechnical concern of collapsible soils such as loess is their hydromechanical instability. During (re)wetting, metastable aggregates disintegrate leading soil to collapse under the applied load or self-weight. In situ chemical stabilisation, such as grouting, is a favoured option to improve the mechanical behaviour of soils; however, the low permeability of loess limits the [...]
DeepPhasePick: A method for Detecting and Picking Seismic Phases from Local Earthquakes based on highly optimized Convolutional and Recurrent Deep Neural Networks
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Seismic phase detection, identification and first-onset picking are basic but essential routines to analyse earthquake data. As both the number of seismic stations, globally and regionally, and the number of experiments greatly increase due to ever greater availability of instrumentation, automated data processing becomes more and more essential. E.g., for modern seismic experiments involving [...]
A Storm Hazard Matrix combining coastal flooding and beach erosion
Published: 2020-10-24
Subjects: Oceanography, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering
Coastal storms cause widespread damage to property, infrastructure, economic activity and the environment. Along open sandy coastlines, two of the primary coastal storm hazards are coastal flooding by elevated ocean water levels and beach erosion as the result of storm wave action. At continental margins characterized by a shallow, wide continental shelf, coastal storms are more commonly [...]
Modeling transpiration with sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence via water use efficiency and stomatal conductance
Published: 2020-10-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology
Successfully applied in the carbon research area, sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) has raised the interest of researchers from the water research domain. However, the mechanism between SIF emitted by plants and transpiration (T) has not been fully explored. To improve the understanding of the relationship between SIF and T, we developed two SIF-T models, the WUE model and the [...]
Sedimentological and stratigraphic criteria to distinguish between basin-floor and slope mudstones: Implications for the delivery of mud to deep-water environments
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Deep-water mudstones overlying basin-floor and slope sandstone-prone deposits are widely interpreted as hemipelagic drapes deposited during extended periods of sand starvation. However, the processes of mud transport and deposition, and the resulting facies and sedimentary architecture of mudstones in different deep-water environments, remain poorly understood. This study documents the [...]
Closing the gap: Explaining persistent underestimation by US oil and natural gas production-segment methane inventories
Published: 2020-11-03
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH4) emissions from oil and natural gas (O&NG) systems are an important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, recent synthesis studies of field measurements of CH4 emissions at different spatial scales are ~1.5x-2x greater compared to official greenhouse gas inventory (GHGI) estimates, with the production-segment as the dominant contributor to this divergence. [...]
A single multi-scale and multi-sourced semi-automated lineament detection technique for detailed structural mapping with applications to geothermal energy exploration
Published: 2020-10-22
Subjects: Geology, Geomorphology, Tectonics and Structure
A multitude of semi-automated algorithms, many incorporating multi-sourced datasets into a single analysis, now exist. However, these operate at a fixed pixel resolution resulting in multi-sourced methods being limited by the largest input pixel size. Multi-scale lineament detection circumvents this issue and allows increased levels of detail to be captured. In this study we present a [...]
Morphodynamic modelling of beach cusp formation: the role of wave forcing and sediment composition
Published: 2020-10-29
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A field of beach cusps formed during a field experiment at Nha Trang Beach, Vietnam, under accretive conditions. The measured data was used to set-up morphodynamic simulations in XBeach, which was able to simulate cusp formation from an initially long-shore uniform beach profile. Several types of simulations were run in order to observe the resulting variation in mean cusp dimensions (length, [...]
A comprehensive study to understand the relationship of urbanization and population density with GRACE ΔTWS for selected study regions in India during 2003-2017
Published: 2020-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Planetary Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
This work investigates the relationship between urbanization, population density and meteorological variables (temperature & precipitation) on groundwater storage in India during the period January'2003 to January'2017. Variations in groundwater storage have been analysed using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) derived variations of Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS). In the first part [...]