Understanding factors influencing the detection of mercury policies in modelled Laurentian Great Lakes wet deposition
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We used chemical transport modelling to better understand the extent to which policy-related anthropogenic mercury emissions changes (a policy signal) can be statistically detected in wet deposition measurements in the Great Lakes region on the subdecadal scale, given sources of noise. In our modelling experiment, we consider hypothetical regional (North American) and global (rest of the world) policy changes, consistent with existing policy efforts (Δglobal = -18%; Δregional = -30%) that divide an eight-year period. The magnitude of statistically significant (p < 0.1) pre- and post-policy period wet deposition differences, holding all else constant except for the policy change, ranges from -0.3 to -2.0% for the regional policy and -0.8 to -2.7% for the global policy. We then introduce sources of noise-trends and variability in factors that are exogenous to the policy action-and evaluate the extent to which the policy signals can still be detected. For instance, technology-related variability in emissions magnitude and speciation can shift the magnitude of differences between periods, in some cases dampening the policy effect. We have found that the interannual variability in meteorology has the largest effect of the sources of noise considered, driving deposition differences between periods to ±20%, exceeding the magnitude of the policy signal. However, our simulations suggest that gaseous elemental mercury concentration may be more robust to this meteorological variability in this region, and a stronger indicator of local/regional emissions changes. These results highlight the potential challenges of detecting statistically significant policy-related changes in Great Lakes wet deposition within the subdecadal scale.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it