Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
Fingerprinting construction sand supply-networks for traceable sourcing
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Globally increasing demand for construction sand needs to be met with transparent and responsible supply-networks. Currently, there are no scalable methods for tracing construction sand distribution without direct observation. We examined sand “fingerprinting” as a potential tool to trace construction sand supply-networks from “source to sink” in a case study from Texas, USA. Both natural bulk [...]
Autonomous Passage Planning for a Polar Vessel
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
We introduce a method for long-distance maritime route planning in polar regions, taking into account complex changing environmental conditions. The method allows the construction of optimised routes, describing the three main stages of the process: discrete modelling of the environmental conditions using a non-uniform mesh, the construction of mesh-optimal paths, and path smoothing. In order to [...]
A review of coarse mineral dust in the Earth system
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mineral dust particles suspended in the atmosphere span more than three orders of magnitude in diameter, from less than 0.1 µm to more than 100 µm. This wide size range makes dust a unique aerosol species with the ability to interact with many aspects of the Earth system, including radiation, clouds, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, and biogeochemistry. This review focuses on coarse and [...]
Meteorological Drivers of Resource Adequacy Failures in Current and High Renewable Western U.S. Power Systems
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Climate, Meteorology, Power and Energy, Risk Analysis
Power system resource adequacy (RA), or its ability to continually balance energy supply and demand, underpins human and economic health. How meteorology affects RA and RA failures, particularly with increasing penetrations of renewables, is poorly understood. We characterize large-scale circulation patterns that drive RA failures in the Western U.S. at increasing wind and solar penetrations by [...]
Generation of Reproducible Model Freshwater Particulate Matter Analogues to Study the Interaction with Particulate Contaminants.
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies
Aquatic fate models and risk assessment require experimental information on the potential of contaminants to interact with riverine suspended particulate matter (SPM). While for dissolved contaminants partition or sorption coefficients are used, the underlying assumption of chemical equilibrium is invalid for particulate contaminants, such as engineered nanomaterials, incidental nanoparticles, [...]
Unified theoretical framework for mixing state of black carbon
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences
Black carbon (BC) plays an important role in the climate system due to its strong warming effect, yet the magnitude of this effect is highly uncertain due to the complex mixing state of aerosols. Here we build a unified theoretical framework to describe BC’s mixing states, linking dynamic processes to BC coating thickness distribution, and show its self-similarity for sites in diverse [...]
Seasonal water storage in peat-forming bofedales sustains baseflow in the Andes
Published: 2022-09-08
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Humid puna Bofedales, or low gradient peat-forming wetlands, are a characteristic feature of the humid puna - a high elevation, seasonally dry grass- and shrub-land found throughout the Central Andes. Despite the importance of the humid puna in supplying water to downstream communities, and the inference that bofedales may play an important role, few studies have explored the hydrology of [...]
Down-delta hydraulic geometry and its application to the rock record
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Paleodischarge estimation is largely undertaken within fluvial settings, and there are limited paleodischarge estimates specifically from delta deposits, despite their significance globally. Making water paleodischarge estimates for deltas using catchment-based approaches developed using data from fluvial settings requires estimation of parameters from the rock record (e.g. paleotemperature, [...]
Practical sampling criteria for using delta channel width to estimate paleodischarge in the rock record
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Quantifying paleodischarge from geological field observations have been for decades, and remains, a key research challenge. Several paleodischarge scaling relationships have been developed for fluvial environments, such as BQART, Fulcrum and regional hydraulic geometry or for river deltas by precluding the role of wave and tide. In deltas where marine (wave, tide) energy causes bidirectional [...]
Accumulation of radiocarbon in ancient terrestrial landscapes: A small but significant input of unknown origin
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The persistence of soil organic carbon (C) in soil, defined as the mean residence time of organic C compounds in soils, is a critical measure for understanding the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to regulate biogeochemical cycles. The persistence of organic carbon in soil is most often considered at timescales ranging from tens to thousands of years, but the study of organic C in paleosols [...]
Sulfur_X: A model of sulfur degassing during magma ascent
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The degassing of CO2 and S from arc volcanoes is fundamentally important to global climate, eruption forecasting, and cycling of volatiles through subduction zones. However, all existing thermodynamic/empirical models have difficulties reproducing CO2-H2O-S trends observed in melt inclusions and provide widely conflicting results regarding the relationships between pressure and CO2/SO2 in the [...]
A 1.2 Billion Pixel Human-Labeled Dataset for Data-Driven Classification of Coastal Environments
Published: 2022-09-01
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The world’s coastlines are spatially highly variable, coupled-human-natural systems that comprise a nested hierarchy of component landforms, ecosystems, and human interventions, each interacting over a range of space and time scales. Understanding and predicting coastline dynamics necessitates frequent observation from imaging sensors on remote sensing platforms. Machine Learning models that [...]
Calling time on alien plantscapes
Published: 2022-09-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Both urban and rural environments around the globe have become dominated by alien plant species to the extent that plantscapes from one region or country have become difficult to distinguish from many others. This process of plant community homogenisation comes at a cost to cultural identity and undermines people’s sense of place. Although invasive alien plant species have received considerable [...]
A mass budget and box model of global plastics cycling, degradation and dispersal in the land-ocean-atmosphere system
Published: 2022-09-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Since 1950 humans have introduced 8300 teragrams (Tg, 1012 grams, millions of metric tons) of plastic polymers into the Earth’s surface environment. Accounting for the dispersal and fate of produced plastics and fragmented microplastics in the environment has been challenging. Recent studies have fueled debate of the global river budget for plastic transport to oceans, the sinking and beaching of [...]
Characterising Ice Slabs in Firn Using Seismic Full Waveform Inversion
Published: 2022-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
The density structure of firn has implications for hydrological and climate modelling, and ice shelf stability. The structure of firn can be evaluated from depth models of seismic velocity, widely obtained with Herglotz-Wiechert Inversion (HWI), an approach that considers the slowness of refracted seismic arrivals. However, HWI is strictly appropriate only for steady-state firn profiles and the [...]