Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
Back to Basics: On the Proper Determination of Free-Surface Slope (FSS) in Gradually Varied Open Channel Flows
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
This study is a fundamental evaluation of the fluvial wave propagation in river reaches affected by hysteresis, one of the most complex open-channel topics, materialized in loops and lags among hydraulic variables. Hysteresis processes are still understudied as measurements in natural streams for the whole wave propagation duration are hardly available, while the data from existing gaging sites [...]
Streamflow Hysteresis Analysis through a Deep Dive Budget of the St Venant Momentum Terms
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Hysteretic conditions entail non-unique time-independent relationships in flow variables and are prevalent in the unsteady flow regime of most rivers worldwide. Estimation errors associated with the inability of current monitoring techniques to resolve hysteresis effects could have profound implications when the recorded data is used for water resources management and flood forecasting. A deep [...]
High risk, low concern: The climate perception gap in rural America
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Public Health
Rural communities often demonstrate lower levels of concern and reduced support for climate mitigation and policies. This study examined views of climate risk and political support for climate action in Eastern North Carolina, a largely rural and agricultural region, with limited access to health care, and elevated environmental vulnerability. Understanding climate attitudes in this context is [...]
Institutional barriers to food safety: The irrigated vegetable value chain in Accra, Ghana
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The faecal contamination of irrigation water threatens public health. Although safe practices can mitigate hygiene and food safety risks along the urban irrigated vegetable value chain, their adoption remains limited. A behaviour framework was combined with a participatory approach to explore how institutions influence stakeholders’ capability, opportunity and motivation to adopt safe practices [...]
Uncertain seafood sustainability in a manufactured crisis
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Environmental Studies
In 2025, the United States (U.S.) administration issued a new Executive Order (EO), Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness, intensifying efforts to deregulate the seafood sector under the guise of promoting domestic industry. Building on the 2020 EO (Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth), this policy marks a significant escalation in dismantling federal regulatory [...]
Proactive Tundra Conservation Strategy for a Rapidly Changing Arctic
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
Warming induced forest expansion, permafrost thaw, and human activities are major drivers affecting the biodiversity and ecosystem functions of the Arctic tundra. While the pace of climate warming is fastest in the Arctic, some important stressors, like forest expansion, seem relatively slow. The slow response might provide the opportunity to safeguard Arctic biodiversity and ecosystem function [...]
River intermittency and Eocene climate change in the Castissent and Montllobat formations of the southern Pyrenean Foreland
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Geology, Geomorphology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Patterns of river water and sediment transport through time, or river intermittency factors, are generally considered to be highly sensitive to climate and tectonics. Determining the intermittency of rivers in ancient hothouse climates could provide a unique lens through which to investigate Earth’s response to climate change. However, this requires strong constraints on both mean and bankfull [...]
Evolution of the Climate as an Attributable Complex System with Main Cause
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Attributable complex systems can be classified into two categories: those with a main cause and those without. The climate is an attributable complex system with a main cause, where CO2 concentration serves as the primary fingerprint. The essential dynamics of climate change can be effectively captured through the representation of CO2 concentration. In this study, we analyze global warming in [...]
Pathways to Carbon Neutrality: A Review of CO2 Reduction Strategies
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Engineering
The global climate crisis, driven largely by the escalating levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, has prompted an urgent need for effective mitigation strategies. CO2, the predominant greenhouse gas, is primarily released through fossil fuel combustion, industrial processes, and deforestation. Its continuous accumulation in the atmosphere has led to severe climate disruptions, including [...]
Quantifying damage and vulnerability for volcanic hazards
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Volcanology
Reducing volcanic risk requires a comprehensive understanding of the potential impacts of volcanic hazards on various community elements, assets and critical infrastructure. This chapter considers systematic approaches to characterizing the interaction (impacts) between volcanic hazards and assets (broadly defined). Damage states provide a description of volcanic hazard impacts and can be used in [...]
Natural forests of the world - a 2020 baseline for deforestation and degradation monitoring
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Informed decisions to reduce deforestation, protect biodiversity, and curb carbon emissions require not just knowing where forests are, but understanding their composition. Identifying natural forests, which serve as critical biodiversity hotspots and major carbon sinks, is particularly valuable. We developed a novel global natural forest map for 2020 at 10 m resolution. This map can support [...]
Temporal convolutional networks for subsidence prediction in snowy regions
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Sustainability
This paper introduces a model based on a temporal convolutional network (TCN) for predicting future land subsidence caused by groundwater pumping for snow melting. Developed using historical snowfall and cumulative subsidence data from Joetsu City, Japan, the model demonstrates satisfactory performance in predicting observed land subsidence. The results suggest that TCNs are effective for [...]
Consideration of rupture kinematics increases tsunami amplitudes in far-field hazards assessments
Published: 2025-03-26
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Tsunamis are large surges of sea water caused by undersea earthquakes. To prepare for future tsunamis, scientists run computer simulations to estimate how big the waves might be and how often they could happen. These simulations are used to make maps and design buildings that can withstand tsunami impacts. Most of these models assume that when an earthquake breaks a fault this happens all at [...]
Predictable and Unpredictable Aspects of Earthquakes from P wave Onsets: Vigorous Ruptures Finish Quickly
Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
It is widely acknowledged that predicting the final size of an earthquake from the P-wave onset in seismograms is nearly impossible. However, this study explores whether there are any predictable aspects of the rupture process from the initial P-wave. We propose that the moment-normalized duration of an earthquake negatively correlates with its initial stress drop, which is measured from the [...]
Reliability of Contrast-Based Automated Fracture Detection from Decimeter Resolution Aerial Imagery
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Geotechnical Engineering, Other Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
Aerial imagery that captures outcrop exposures of rocks enables the characterization of structural discontinuities such as faults and fractures across large and difficult-to-access areas. These datasets provide an opportunity to analyze the characteristics of fault and fracture networks as analogues for the subsurface. The application of automated interpretation methods to imagery has the [...]