Preprints
There are 6976 Preprints listed.
Soil carbon stocks not linked to aboveground litter input and chemistry of old-growth forest and adjacent prairie
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
The long-standing assumption that aboveground plant litter inputs have a substantial influence on soil organic carbon storage (SOC) and dynamics has been challenged by a new paradigm for SOC formation and persistence. We tested the importance of plant litter chemistry on SOC storage, distribution, composition, and age by comparing two highly contrasting ecosystems: an old-growth coast redwood [...]
Calling for a National Model Benchmarking Facility
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Biology, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Life Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Systems Biology
The modern world uses predictive computer models for many important purposes, including weather predictions, epidemic management, flood forecasting and warnings, and economic policymaking. We need to know how much we can trust the projections of these models, not only to achieve more accurate projections for systems, but also to undertake scientific learning about systems by incrementally testing [...]
The Invisibility of Health Effects Associated with Water Pollution within Disease Burden Estimates: Analysis from a Colombian Andean Watershed
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Public Health
Modernization goes along with a significant increase in pollution-related health risks linked to the ever growing economic and technological development. In addition to water-related communicable diseases, there are emerging concerns regarding the burden of disease attributable to the complexity of chemical pollution loads released into the environment. Studies demonstrating an association [...]
Radiocarbon analysis of soil microbial biomass via direct chloroform extraction
Published: 2023-04-15
Subjects: Biogeochemistry
Microbial processing of soil organic matter is a significant driver of C cycling, yet we lack an understanding of what shapes the turnover of this large terrestrial pool. In part, this is due to limited options for accurately identifying the source of C assimilated by microbial communities. Laboratory incubations are the most common method for this; however, they can introduce artifacts due to [...]
Proposal of a new climate classification based on Köppen and Trewartha
Published: 2023-04-17
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A new and detailed climate classification based on Köppen-Geiger and Trewartha schemes is proposed, which uses four components (thermal zone, continentality, humidity, and seasonal distribution of precipitation) to determine a location’s climate type. It specifies thermal zones into nine types by subdividing tropical, subtropical, temperate, and polar zones, which are based on original Trewartha [...]
Ammonia emissions from a dairy housing and a wastewater treatment plant quantified with an inverse dispersion method accounting for deposition loss
Published: 2023-04-17
Subjects: Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering
Ammonia (NH3) emissions negatively impact air, soil, and water quality, hence human health and biodiversity. Significant emissions, including the largest sources, originate from single or multiple structures, such as livestock facilities and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The inverse dispersion method (IDM) is effective in measuring total emissions from such [...]
Estimating cooling capacities from aerial images using convolutional neural networks
Published: 2023-04-17
Subjects: Remote Sensing
In recent decades, the global cooling demand has significantly increased and is expected to grow even further in the future. However, knowledge regarding the spatial distribution of cooling demand is sparse. Most existing studies are based on statistical modelling, which lack in small-scale details and cannot accurately identify individual large cooling producers. In this study, we implement and [...]
A key role for diffusion creep in eclogites: Omphacite deformation in the Zermatt-Saas Unit, Italian Alps
Published: 2023-04-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Mineral Physics, Tectonics and Structure
Eclogites are important components of subduction-collision zones, with the mineral omphacite acting as the supporting framework mineral that accommodates the majority of any accumulated strain. As such it is important to determine which deformation mechanisms operate in omphacite during and after its formation to understand the rheology of deforming subducted crust. Such information is key to [...]
Global multi-hazard risk assessment in a changing climate
Published: 2023-04-20
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Risk Analysis
Natural hazards pose significant risks to people and assets in many regions of the world. Quantifying associated risks is crucial for many applications such as adaptation option appraisal and insurance pricing. However, traditional risk assessment approaches have focused on the impacts of single hazards, ignoring the effects of multi-hazard risks and potentially leading to underestimations or [...]
Electric Vehicles as Electric Energy Storage for a Zero Emission Grid
Published: 2023-04-19
Subjects: Other Engineering
Electric Vehicles, especially electric vehicles with bidirectional Vehicle-toGrid (V2G) connectivity can serve as electric energy storage assets. Following the dramtatic increase in electric vehicle registrations in 2022 there can be little doubt that electric vehicles will become a major portion of the entire light duty transportation fleet. This paper endeavors to project the growing electric [...]
On Constructing Limits-of-Acceptability in Watershed Hydrology using Decision Trees
Published: 2023-04-20
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A hydrological model incurs three types of uncertainties: measurement, structural and parametric uncertainty. For instance, in rainfall-runoff models, measurement uncertainty exists due to errors in measurements of rainfall and streamflow data. Structural uncertainty exists due to errors in mathematical representation of hydrological processes. Parametric uncertainty is a consequence of our [...]
Context-aware UAV LiDAR reveals forest structure and improves tree diameter estimates in subalpine forest
Published: 2023-04-19
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Forest structure, tree diameter, and aboveground biomass (AGB) are central variables in trait‑based ecology and forest management, and recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and LiDAR surveys have substantially improved tree‑level phenotyping of these structural attributes. Building on these developments, machine‑learning (ML) applications are increasingly used to refine tree‑diameter [...]
From strain to displacement: using deformation to enhance distributed acoustic sensing applications
Published: 2023-04-21
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Over a period of less than a decade, Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) has become a well-established technology in seismology. For historical and practical reasons, DAS manufacturers usually provide instruments that natively record strain (rate) as the principal measurement. While at first glance strain recordings seem related to ground motion waveforms (displacement, velocity, acceleration), [...]
The Dynamics of the India-Eurasia Collision: Faulted Viscous Continuum Models Constrained by High-Resolution Sentinel-1 InSAR and GNSS Velocities
Published: 2023-04-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences
The dynamics of lithospheric deformation in the India-Eurasia collision zone has been debated over many decades. Here we test a two-dimensional (2-D) Thin Viscous Shell (TVS) approach that has been adapted to explicitly account for displacement on major faults and investigate the impact of lateral variations in depth-averaged lithospheric strength. We present a suite of dynamic models to explain [...]
Assessing the potential of low transmissivity aquifers for ATES systems: a case study in Flanders (Belgium)
Published: 2023-04-21
Subjects: Geology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The Member States of the European Union pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95% by 2050. Shallow geothermal systems might substantially contribute by providing heating and cooling in a sustainable way through seasonally storing heat and cold in the shallow ground (<200m). When the minimum yield to install a cost-effective aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) system cannot be met, [...]