Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
Causing of missing snowmelt following drought
Published: 2022-03-05
Subjects: Water Resource Management
Water management in snowy mountainous regions hinges on forecasting snowmelt runoff. However, droughts are altering snowpack-runoff relationships with ongoing debate about the driving mechanisms. For example, in 2021 in California, less than half of predicted streamflow arrived. Mechanisms proposed for this `missing' streamflow included changes in evapotranspiration, rainfall, and subsurface [...]
Geodynamics of continental rift initiation and evolution
Published: 2022-03-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
A rift is a nascent plate boundary where continental lithosphere is extended and possibly broken. In the geologic past, rifting played a major role in shaping the surface of our planet, while at present, continental rifts are of societal relevance by hosting key georesources such as geothermal energy and ore deposits. This Review discusses fundamental rift processes, geodynamic forces and their [...]
The size-distribution of Earth’s lakes and ponds: limits to power-law behavior
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Global-scale characterizations of Earth's lakes and ponds assume their surface areas are power-law distributed across the full size range. However, empirical power-laws only hold across finite ranges of scales. In this paper, we synthesize evidence for upper and lower limits to power-law behavior in lake size-distributions. We find support for the power-law assumption in general. We also find [...]
Scaling relationships for whole-lake primary production
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Scaling relationships provide simple rules for understanding complex ecological patterns. We evaluated scaling relationships between whole-lake (benthic + pelagic) primary production and the surface areas and volumes of 73 lakes. Whole-lake primary production scales isometrically with surface area, after accounting for latitudinal gradients of temperature and insolation. Whole-lake primary [...]
The relationship between lake surface area and maximum depth
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Maximum depth varies among lakes from $<$1 to 1741 meters, but attempts to explain this variation have achieved little predictive power. In this paper, we describe the probability distribution of maximum depths based on recent developments in the theory of fractal Brownian motions. The theoretical distribution is right-tailed and adequately captures variations in maximum depth in a dataset of [...]
Inverting passive margin stratigraphy for marine sediment transport dynamics over geologic time
Published: 2022-03-09
Subjects: Geology, Geomorphology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Passive margin stratigraphy contains time-integrated records of landscapes that have long since vanished. Quantitatively reading the stratigraphic record using coupled landscape evolution and stratigraphic forward models (SFMs) is a promising approach to extracting information about landscape history. However, there is no consensus about the optimal form of simple SFMs because there has been a [...]
Multi-faceted analyses of seasonal trends and drivers of land surface variables in Indo-Gangetic river basins
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Statistics and Probability
The Indo-Gangetic river basins feature a wide range of climatic, topographic, and land cover characteristics providing a suitable setting for the exploration of multivariate time series. Here, we collocated a comprehensive feature space for these river basins including Earth observation time series on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), surface water area (SWA), and snow cover area [...]
Paleocene to Miocene southern Tethyan carbonate factories of the Southwestern and Western Central Asia
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Geology, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Sedimentology
One hundred and forty-four sections of shallow-water carbonates, deposited between the Paleocene and the Miocene, from the Levant to the Himalaya, have been investigated to analyze the distribution of carbonate facies and carbonate producing organisms. Large benthic foraminifera resulted the volumetrically most important group of carbonate producers during the whole period, with a peak in [...]
Abrupt shift to El Niño-like mean state conditions in the tropical Pacific during the Little Ice Age
Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Hydrology
The mean state of the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere climate, in particular its east-west asymmetry, has profound consequences for regional climates and for the El Niño/ Southern Oscillation variability. Here we present a new high-resolution paleohydrological record using the stable-hydrogen-isotopic composition of terrestrial-lipid biomarkers (δDwax) from a 1,400-year-old lake sedimentary [...]
The development of the eastern Orpheus rift basin, offshore eastern Canada: A case study of the interplay between rift-related faulting and salt deposition and flow
Published: 2022-03-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
The salt-rich Orpheus rift basin, part of the eastern North American (ENAM) rift system, formed during the Late Triassic to Early Jurassic prior to opening of the Atlantic Ocean. Using a dense grid of 2D seismic-reflection lines, data from nearby wells, and information from adjacent ENAM rift basins, we have established a tectonostratigraphic framework, identified key structural elements, and [...]
Brittle basement deformation during the Caledonian Orogeny observed by K-Ar geochronology of illite-bearing fault gouge in west-central Sweden
Published: 2022-03-26
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study presents K-Ar geochronology ages of illite from fault gouge in the crystalline basement in central-western Sweden. Samples of fault gouge were taken from two faults localizing brittle deformation along and within mafic dikes that intrude Paleoproterozoic granites. K-Ar ages from the ten dated fractions span from 823 Ma to 392 Ma. The older ages obtained, spanning from 823 to 477 Ma, [...]
Real-Time Streamflow Forecasting Framework, Implementation and Post-Analysis Using Deep Learning
Published: 2022-03-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences
Rainfall-runoff modeling and streamflow prediction using deep learning algorithms have been studied significantly in the last few years. The majority of these studies focus on the simulation and testing of historical datasets. Deployment and operation of a real-time streamflow forecast model using deep learning will face additional data and computational challenges such as inaccurate rainfall [...]
LSTM with forget gates optimized by Optuna for lithofacies prediction
Published: 2022-03-15
Subjects: Computational Engineering
One of major technical competitions in energy industry relates to how optimally deep-learning architectures we can design. Optimization of hyperparameters is treated as labor-intensive. However, it is important to tune the parameters especially when we deal with relatively small targets, yet high-impact consequences can be resulted. In this study, we adapt Optuna, the global optimizer, for tuning [...]
Multilevel multifidelity Monte Carlo methods for assessing coastal flood risk
Published: 2022-03-14
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Risk Analysis, Statistical Methodology, Statistics and Probability
When choosing an appropriate hydrodynamic model, there is always a compromise between accuracy and computational cost, with high fidelity models being more expensive than low fidelity ones. However, when assessing uncertainty, we can use a multifidelity approach to take advantage of the accuracy of high fidelity models and the computational efficiency of low fidelity models. Here, we apply the [...]
Self-replicating subduction zone initiation by polarity reversal
Published: 2022-03-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Tectonics and Structure
Subduction zones have recurrently formed on Earth. Previous studies have, however, suggested that they are unlikely to start in the interior of a pristine ocean. Instead, they seem to be more likely to form from another pre-existing subduction zone. One widely cited conceptual model to start new subduction zones is polarity reversal, resulting from the shutdown of a pre-existent subduction zone [...]