Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
On the Origin of Holocene Sea-Level Transgressions in Formerly Glaciated Regions
Published: 2024-05-23
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Over glacial cycles, the growing and shrinking of ice sheets has caused relative sea level (RSL) to differ from global mean sea level (GMSL) due to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), which depends on the viscoelastic properties of the solid Earth. During the last termination and through the Holocene, GIA-related isostatic uplift caused RSL to fall in regions formerly covered by ice sheets. [...]
Scenario Development for Safety Assessment in Deep Geologic Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Review
Published: 2024-07-30
Subjects: Risk Analysis
Radiation and radioactive substances result in the production of radioactive wastes which require safe management and disposal to avoid risks to human health and the environment. To ensure permanent safe disposal the performance of a deep geological repository for radioactive waste is assessed against internationally agreed risk-based standards. Assessing post-closure safety of the future [...]
Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model projections
Published: 2024-06-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Multiple recent record shattering weather events raise questions about the adequacy of climate models to effectively predict and prepare for unprecedented climate impacts on human life, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Here we show that extreme heat in several regions globally is increasing significantly and faster in magnitude than what state-of-the-art climate models have predicted under present [...]
River Morphology Information System: A Web Cyberinfrastructure for Advancing River Morphology Research
Published: 2024-05-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Databases and Information Systems, Geographic Information Sciences, Software Engineering
The study and management of river systems are increasingly challenged by the complexity and volume of data required to understand and predict river morphology changes. The River Morphology Information System (RIMORPHIS) is introduced as a transformative solution to these challenges, serving as an open-access web-based cyberinfrastructure designed to enable advanced research in river morphology [...]
Calibration of Permeability Models from Sandstones to Carbonates Using Capillary Pressure: Applicable to U.S. Shallow Marine Reservoirs
Published: 2025-03-26
Subjects: Engineering
Permeability estimation plays a crucial role in reservoir characterization and is commonly determined through core analysis. Additionally, permeability can be inferred from mercury injection test data. Several models have been developed for this purpose, with their parameters influenced by factors such as pore structure, rock heterogeneity, and pore throat distribution. The widely recognized [...]
Local water year values for the conterminous United States
Published: 2024-05-24
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Water Resource Management
Quantifying and predicting precipitation and water flow and their influences is challenged by the dynamic relationships between and timing of precipitation and water fluxes. To help with these challenges, scientists use “water year” to examine and predict the impacts of precipitation and relevant extreme climatic and hydrological events on ecosystems. However, traditional water year definitions [...]
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multimodal Large Language Models in Hydrological Applications
Published: 2024-05-24
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable advancements, achieving a level of intelligence comparable to human capabilities. In this study, we conduct an analysis of the latest Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), specifically Multimodal-GPT, GPT-4 Vision, Gemini and LLaVa, focusing on their application in the hydrology domain. The hydrology domain holds [...]
Rising temperatures drive lower summer minimum flows across hydrologically diverse catchments in British Columbia
Published: 2024-05-24
Subjects: Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Excessively low stream flows harm ecosystems and societies, so two key goals of low-flow hydrology are to understand their drivers and to predict their severity and frequency. We show that linear regressions can accomplish both goals across diverse catchments. We analyse 230 unregulated moderate to high relief catchments across rainfall-dominated, hybrid, snowmelt-dominated, and glacial regimes [...]
Can We Reverse Global Warming?
Published: 2024-05-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Without mitigation, Climate Change is expected to costs large amounts of money, cause vast amounts of human suffering and death and threatens the survival of countless species. Rising global temperatures alone are expected to cause a drop in GDP of 30 – 70% for many countries with already high temperatures. In combination with other factors (population growth, increasing water stress, coastal [...]
Ringing mountain ranges: Teleseismic signature of the interaction of high-frequency wavefields with near-source topography at the Degelen nuclear test site
Published: 2024-05-26
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Over the last decade there has been an international effort to find methods to recover and digitize recordings from historical earthquakes and explosions that occurred during the 1950’s through to the 1980’s. Making these recordings accessible in digital format offers opportunities to study what signatures are encoded in the data, and to apply state-of-the-art techniques and methods to historical [...]
Large indirect income impacts of tropical cyclones shaped by disaster response
Published: 2024-05-30
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Tropical cyclones (TCs) have direct economic impacts, destroying property and infrastructure. However, the sign and magnitude of their indirect impacts via longer-term changes in economic output remain unclear. Here we use data on TC winds and rainfall combined with county-level income in the U.S. to quantify the long-term indirect impacts of TCs. We find a nonlinear response of income growth to [...]
The State of Hydroinformatics Prior to Generative AI: Establishing a Quantitative Baseline (2018–2023)
Published: 2024-05-31
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Education, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
The rapid advancement of web applications and machine learning has fundamentally reshaped hydrogeological sciences. While the recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) dominates current discourse, understanding the trajectory of this shift requires quantifying the foundational digitization trends that preceded it. This study presents an automated web-mining framework designed to extract [...]
Assessment of RCA4, CORDEX Africa domains RCMs Performance in Simulating Rainfall and Temperature: A case of Gilgal Gibe watershed, Ethiopia
Published: 2024-05-30
Subjects: Engineering Education
Examining the spatiotemporal dynamics of meteorological variables in the context of changing climate, particularly in countries where rainfed agriculture, and hydropower project are predominant, is vital to assess climate-induced change. CORDEX Africa has been developed to forecast Africa's climate variation and variabilities. the RCA4 regional climate model performance of CORDEX Africa domains [...]
Opening doors to physical sample tracking and attribution in Earth and environmental sciences
Published: 2024-05-30
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Systems Biology
Physical samples and their associated (meta)data underpin scientific discoveries across disciplines and can enable new science when appropriately archived. However, there are significant gaps in current practices and infrastructure that prevent accurate provenance tracking, reproducibility, and attribution. For most samples, descriptive metadata are often sparse, inaccessible, or absent. Samples [...]
Mitigating marine plastic debris in Hong Kong: an action plan
Published: 2024-05-31
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The impact of marine debris ranges from ecological and social to economic, including ingestion by wildlife, loss of tourist potential and high costs of clean-ups and reallocation of collected litter. In Hong Kong, an astounding amount of litter is collected annually, encompassing plastic food packaging, bottles and bottle caps. With over 60% of discarded items originating from shoreline [...]