Preprints
There are 6976 Preprints listed.
Climate and Air Quality Impact of Using Ammonia as an Alternative Shipping Fuel
Published: 2024-02-07
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
As carbon-free fuel, ammonia has been proposed as an alternative fuel to facilitate maritime decarbonization. Deployment of ammonia-powered ships is proposed as soon as 2024. However, emissions of NOx, NH3 and N2O resulting from ammonia combustion could cause impacts on air quality and climate. In this study, we assess whether and under what conditions switching to ammonia fuel might affect [...]
Magma solidification effects during sill emplacement: insights from laboratory experiments
Published: 2024-02-09
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Igneous sills and interconnected sill complexes transport magma both vertically through the Earth’s crust and laterally over potentially long distances. Although cooling and solidification of magma are acknowledged to play a major role in the propagation and emplacement of sills, their contributions to sill formation remain poorly understood. Here, the effects of solidification on sill [...]
Nitrogen Availability and Denitrification in Urban Agriculture and Regreened Vacant Lots
Published: 2024-02-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Many cities demolish abandoned homes and create regreened vacant lots (RVLs), and an increasingly popular, high-intensity use of RVLs is as urban agriculture (UA) sites. UA may potentially result in higher nitrogen (N) runoff to aquatic ecosystems, but this potential has not been quantified. We examined the role that varying land reuse intensity plays in determining potential for N export via [...]
An aminostratigraphy for the Quaternary of the Swiss Plateau
Published: 2024-02-08
Subjects: Analytical Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Other Earth Sciences, Stratigraphy
Here we develop an amino acid chronology to help establish a dated sequence for the important Early Pleistocene Höhere and Tiefere Deckenschotter lithostratigraphic units, as well as other Quaternary deposits from the Swiss Plateau. Age discrimination is possible between the Quaternary sites from the Swiss Plateau in six different biominerals: Bithynia opercula, shell fragments from Fruticola, [...]
Collaborative systems thinking analysis for enhancing climate smart agricultural (CSA) technology adoption in Africa
Published: 2024-02-08
Subjects: Agriculture
Agricultural technology adoption is a critical driver of sustainable development, particularly in developing regions where agriculture plays a pivotal role in food security and livelihoods. This study combines network analysis, including causal loop diagrams (CLD), with centrality metrics, to uncover key leverage points within the system where targeted interventions can yield significant impacts [...]
A new calibration of the OPAM thermobarometer for anhydrous and hydrous mafic systems
Published: 2024-02-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Melt-based thermobarometers are essential tools to recover pre-eruptive magma storage conditions through their application to bulk rock and liquid chemistry. In active volcanic systems, thermobarometric results can be combined with independent geophysical data during or after an eruption to validate conceptual models. In this contribution, we revisit the thermobarometer for melts equilibrated [...]
WaterGate: An Accessible Computational Model of Flooding Patterns
Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
240 million people are affected by floods each year, reflecting the urgent need for accessible flood prediction and detection. WaterGate is a computational model that uses geographic elevation data and the rational method to predict flooding patterns , generating an interactive 3D model for user accessibility. Computational hydrology applies numerical methods, machine learning algorithms, and [...]
Seasonality of spectral radiative fluxes and optical properties of Arctic sea ice during the spring-summer transition
Published: 2024-02-16
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The reflection, absorption, and transmittance of solar (shortwave) radiation by sea ice play a crucial role in physical and biological processes in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean and atmosphere. These sea ice optical properties are of great importance, in particular during the melt season, as they significantly impact energy fluxes within and the total energy budget of the coupled [...]
Combining sustainability and resilience assessment of a Regional Food System: evaluating an innovative Swiss alpine valley
Published: 2024-02-12
Subjects: Food Science
The Swiss food system faces complex economic, social, and environmental challenges concurrent with a consensus among citizens, scientists, and institutions advocating for a transition toward sustainable food production. We argue that resilient and sustainable Regional Food Systems have a spillover effect on global food system sustainability and resilience. This study focuses on the regional [...]
Temporal Comparisons Involving Paleoclimate Data Assimilation: Challenges and Remedies
Published: 2024-02-14
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Paleoclimate reconstructions are increasingly central to climate assessments, placing recent and future variability in a broader historical context. Paleoclimate reconstructions are increasingly central to climate assessments, placing recent and future variability in a broader historical context. Several estimation methods produce plumes of climate trajectories that practitioners often want to [...]
Lithospheric unzipping explaining hot orogenesis during continental subduction
Published: 2024-02-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Phanerozoic accretionary orogens typically contain upper crustal nappes derived from subducted lithosphere - oceanic or continental - that display (ultra-)high-pressure, low-temperature ((U)HP-LT) metamorphism. Surprisingly, such orogens often also contain coeval continent-derived nappes that underwent ‘Barrovian’ (MP-HT) syn-burial metamorphism instead. Here, we show examples from the eastern [...]
Exponentially cascaded cross-sectional volume estimates from elevation data
Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
The relationship between discharges and flow heights is a critical component of hydraulic modelling, often carried out involving data on the elevation profiles of the river bed. However, obtaining and using cross-sectional profile data can be resource intensive. Methods for profile estimation from rasterized elevation and bathymetry can help overcome this. In this paper, an efficient algorithm [...]
Multi-satellite data depicts record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout
Published: 2024-02-14
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Accidental blowouts in oil and gas wells can result in large and prolonged methane emissions, which are often unreported when happening in remote places. The rapid advancement of space-based methods for detecting and quantifying methane plumes provides an essential tool for uncovering these super-emission events. We use a range of methane-sensitive satellites to document a methane leak from a [...]
Graph Characterization of Higher Order Structure in Atmospheric Chemical Reaction Mechanisms
Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Chemistry, Other Applied Mathematics, Other Environmental Sciences
Atmospheric chemical reactions play an important role in air quality and climate change. While the structure and dynamics of individual chemical reactions are fairly well understood, the emergent properties of the entire atmospheric chemical system, which can involve many different species that participate in many different reactions, are not well described. In this work, we leverage [...]
Scaling High-resolution Soil Organic Matter Composition to Improve Predictions of Potential Soil Respiration Across the Continental United States
Published: 2024-02-13
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Soil Science
Despite the importance of microbial respiration of soil organic matter (SOM) in regulating carbon flux between soils and atmosphere, soil carbon cycling models remain primarily based on climate and soil properties, leading to large uncertainty in predictions. With data from the 1000 Soils Pilot of the Molecular Observation Network (MONet), we analyzed high resolution water-extractable SOM [...]