Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Climate resilience from long-term low till adoption in US farms
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Low-intensity tillage (low till) has expanded rapidly in the United States since 2000. Evidence on its yield impacts has come mainly from field experiments and has been limited to short time horizons. Using satellite-based observations from more than 40 million field-year pairs across the U.S. Corn Belt from 1999-2023, we demonstrate that yield gains continue to accrue with longer duration of [...]
Improvement of Daily Temperature Forecasts from a Prediction Market
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology, Natural Resource Economics, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Prediction markets aggregate and distill the collective views of participants who have a financial stake in being correct. They have been shown to produce more accurate forecasts in realms like election results, which are not easily amenable to mechanistic modeling because they entail forecasting human behavior. It is far less clear that prediction markets should improve the accuracy of [...]
Fixed-ground multisensor monitoring resolves longitudinal vegetation condition and fuel-state structure in Southern California chaparral and oak scenes
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Wildfire-relevant vegetation and fuel conditions evolve through interacting changes in vegetation condition, three-dimensional fuel structure, thermal response, and atmospheric drying, yet these dimensions are commonly monitored separately. This study evaluated repeated fixed-ground multisensor monitoring at two fixed vegetation scenes in Placerita Canyon, California. Multispectral imaging, [...]
Novel Mechanism of Abiotic Ammonium Oxidation Triggers Nitrous Oxide Bursts Upon Soil Rewetting
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Drought-rewetting cycles (DWC) in soil are accompanied by a rapid burst of nitrous oxide (N2O) emission within minutes without reactivation of dormant microbes. Here we present a manifold of evidence for a previously unrecognized abiotic mechanism connecting soil ammonium (NH4+) to N2O with hydroxylamine (NH2OH) as a key intermediate. DWC experiments in the Negev Desert soil revealed comparable [...]
The relation of ENSO with global surface temperature
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Here we examined the seasonal structure of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)–global surface temperature relation in monthly observations for June 1979–May 2026. Neglecting seasonality, correlations of Niño-3.4 with global mean surface temperature (GMST) and tropical mean surface temperature (TMST) are largest at lags of three and two months, respectively; without detrending, GMST [...]
Understanding Earthquake Physics with On-Fault Observatories
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earthquakes often strike without warning. Current fault monitoring infrastructure is not sensitive enough to detect signals such as accelerating fault creep or dilation, which laboratory experiments and numerical models predict may precede large earthquakes. Here we argue that a paradigm shift is needed and technically achievable: from inferring faulting processes from a distance with surface [...]
Assessment of adjacency effect correction methods for Sentinel-2 MSI observations over mid-latitude lakes
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate retrieval of remote-sensing reflectance (Rrs) from lakes requires separating water-leaving radiance from atmospheric, surface and adjacency contributions. We assessed adjacency effect correction (AEC) methods for Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) imagery using 329 satellite--insitu matchups from four mid-latitude lakes: Greifensee, Lake Geneva, Lake Garda and Lake Trasimeno. The [...]
Training-Free Monitoring of Kenya with Pre-computed Satellite Embeddings: Lake Expansion, Construction Dating and Crop Retrieval with TESSERA
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pre-computed embeddings from geospatial foundation models turn the most expensive step of satellite analysis into shared data. We test how much analysis this enables for one country, using TESSERA, which publishes a 128-dimensional embedding for every 10 m pixel and year. An audit of Kenya shows that all 4,766 tiles centred in the country carry all nine years (2017–2025), but that the landmask [...]
Can recovered data-centre heat supply solid-sorbent direct air capture regeneration? A thermodynamic and carbon-accounting review of the proposed DACR–HSDC coupling, with falsifiable deployment gates
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Abstract Background. Direct air capture (DAC) using temperature-vacuum swing adsorption requires electricity and low- to medium-temperature regeneration heat. Data centres reject heat that may be available for this purpose, but the temperature, timing and emissions intensity of that heat determine whether integration produces additional net atmospheric removal. An earlier design document by the [...]
Metal Toxin Signatures in the Smoke of Wildland–Urban Interface Fires
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Wildland–urban interface (WUI) fires burn natural and built environments simultaneously, generating smoke from vegetation, soil, buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure. Airborne metals can provide source signatures and pose inhalation hazards, yet the sources and physicochemical properties of these metals in WUI fire smoke remain poorly resolved. This uncertainty limits identification of burned [...]
Earthquake damage mapping from Sentinel-1 modeling against coherence damage proxy
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper tests whether a supervised model that uses the same Sentinel-1 signal as the coherence damage proxy can rank earthquake damage better than the proxy itself. Damage grades from Copernicus EMS for four earthquakes are joined to 783 635 OpenStreet- Map footprints over 28 assessed areas, and the coherence drop is aggregated to buildings, morphological blocks and cells of 50 m to 400 m. A [...]
Super El Niño can raise coastal extreme sea-level risk tenfold
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a dominant mode of global climate variability with a range of societally relevant impacts. However, its effect on global coastal sea-level extremes remains poorly quantified, especially for very strong ("super") El Niños, which are rare. Here we analyse global reanalyses, hindcasts, and reconstructions to quantify how El Niño alters extreme sea level frequencies [...]
Annual mean methane emissions from individual oil-gas point sources worldwide inferred from multi-satellite plume-imaging observations
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Plume-imaging satellite instruments routinely reveal large methane point source emissions from oil and gas systems. But the observations are for instantaneous plumes, and the instruments have limited detection and revisit capabilities, making it challenging to infer time-averaged emission rates as needed for emission inventories and reporting. Here we develop a general method to infer the [...]
Fit for purpose evapotranspiration measurements: A multi-site comparison of lower-cost approaches across croplands and shrublands
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Evapotranspiration (ET) links the water and energy cycles, yet research-grade eddy covariance (EC) systems may not be the best option to deploy operationally for water management. Emerging lower-cost ET approaches may expand fit-for-purpose observations, but their reliability across contrasting ecosystems, climates, and instrumentation configurations remains uncertain. Here, we evaluate [...]
Forecasting the moisture content of live forest fuels with a transformer machine learning model and Sentinel-2 satellite data
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) provides an indicator of vegetation flammability, the potential for canopy dieback from drought, and habitat quality for arboreal fauna. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have increased the potential in meteorological forecasts for Earth surface forecasting. Combining weather forecasts with remotely sensed LFMC offers a promising avenue for short and [...]