Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Paragliders as probes of the Alpine boundary layer: sink polars from 86 000 flight logs and the flow field of a valley
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Paraglider flight logs are a dense, free and continuous record of the air over mountains: every thermal day, hundreds of pilots fly for hours along the slopes and across the valleys and record their vertical speed once per second. The obstacle is that a vario measures the air plus the sink of the glider, and the sink polars of paragliders are unknown. We obtain them from the logs themselves. [...]
Linking Hemispheric Warming Asymmetry to Anthropogenic Waste Heat
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
This paper proposes a potential link between the observed hemispheric warming asymmetry and the distribution of population and per capita energy consumption. Nearly 87% of the world’s population resides in the northern hemisphere, where per capita energy consumption has also been substantially higher than in the southern hemisphere. Consequently, anthropogenic waste heat discharged into the [...]
GeONet: Geometry-Encoded Operator Network for Predicting Flow in Heterogeneous Porous Media
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rapid prediction of pressure-driven flow in microfluidic porous-media analogs is important for experimental design, tracer-test interpretation, and real-time digital-twin development for subsurface energy and critical mineral science applications. High-fidelity numerical simulators resolve geometry-controlled flow in heterogeneous pore networks, but their computational cost limits repeated [...]
A survey of transverse drainages in the Susquehanna River basin, Pennsylvania
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
While large-scale transverse drainages (TDs) such as those of the Susquehanna River above Harrisburg, PA, have been recognized since the nineteenth century, no systematic surveys have been done of TDs since Ver Steeg (1930). A topographic and statistical analysis of TDs in the Susquehanna River basin using Google Earth® and associated overlays identified 653 TDs in the study area, 95% of which [...]
Insights into magmatic processes at Shishaldin Volcano based on satellite and airborne volcanic gas measurements and magma degassing models
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Shishaldin Volcano is a remote and frequently active basaltic volcano with eruptions in 2019–2020 and 2023 that exhibited notable variations in monitoring signals and explosivity. Here we combine complementary ultraviolet (TROPOMI) and infrared (IASI) satellite SO2 observations with airborne gas measurements, petrologic constraints, and degassing models to investigate magma degassing processes [...]
Time-mean Tropical Circulation in an Idealized Moist GCM: Dependence on Zonally Asymmetric Forcings
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study investigates how the time-mean tropical circulation is affected by zonally varying surface boundary conditions in an idealized moist aquaplanet model. We compare a zonally symmetric control with two perturbation cases driven by prescribed zonal wavenumber-1 heating and cooling patterns of varying intensities, creating tropical warm and cold pools. The forcings substantially slow the [...]
Erosion sensitivity of rock organic carbon oxidation reinforces CO2 release at high erosion rates
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Oxidation of rock organic carbon (OCpetro) can exert a substantial control on atmospheric CO2 over geological timescales, yet the erosion sensitivity of this reaction has proved challenging to isolate and quantify due to the covariation of erosion with other environmental variables in many existing datasets. Here we apply the rhenium (Re) proxy to quantify OCpetro oxidation across a three [...]
Structural Geothermal Plays in the Lower Carboniferous Limestone, East Midlands, UK: Insights from Legacy Geophysical Data
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Lower Carboniferous Limestone (LCL) is a promising geothermal target in Britain, but uncertainty in subsurface structure and permeability limits resource assessment. Here, we use the Welton area of the East Midlands, where legacy hydrocarbon exploration data provide detailed subsurface coverage, to investigate the controls on LCL geothermal prospectivity. We integrate 3D seismic reflection, well, [...]
Lixa v0.1.2: an open-source, image-informed framework for closed-loop design of leaching processes for domestic critical-mineral recovery, from the pore to the plant scale
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Mining Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Leaching takes a metal out of a rock and into a solution. In the United States, rare earth elements, lithium and scandium occur mostly in rocks where the metal is thinly spread through a porous matrix: weathered clays, coal ash, lithium claystones and bauxite residue. For such rocks the leaching recipe (reagent, concentration, temperature, particle size, liquid-to-solid ratio and contact time) [...]
Worldwide water gaps: Using relative elevation modelling to identify transverse drainages
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Transverse drainages are stream reaches that flow through, rather than around, topographic high grounds. The development of transverse drainage is intimately tied to the tectonic history of an area, but the identification of transverse reaches has historically been a matter of subjective opinion. Here, a GIS-based method is presented that uses relative elevation modelling to identify and [...]
Modelling the connections between internally and externally drained basins using GIS, Google Earth©, and remote sensing
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The development of internal drainage is intimately tied to the tectonic and climatic history of an area, but research into the exact causes and processes of internal drainage is constrained by the ability to accurately delineate both internally and externally draining watersheds. Until recently, existing global catalogs of internally drained regions were either hand-drawn or based upon digital [...]
Reconstruction of ancestral drainage patterns in an internally draining region, Fars Province, Iran
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Google Earth imagery is used here in conjunction with a Geographic Information System to identify transverse drainages and recreate paleodrainage in an internally draining region in Iran. At least thirty-five water gaps and thirty-four wind gaps are shown to exist in the region, as well as evidence for an integrated paleodrainage that originated north of the internally draining region and [...]
Feature-Relative Deployment Optimisation of Ice-Tethered Buoy Arrays in the Southern Ocean
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Southern Ocean marginal ice zone is critical for climate dynamics and sea-ice model validation, yet remains severely undersampled due to costly deployment and short buoy lifetimes. The sea-ice edge shifts by hundreds of kilometres between years, so fixed-coordinate optimisation fails when future ice conditions are unknown. This paper presents a robust multi-objective framework that encodes [...]
The July 2026 North American wildfire smoke event was three times deadlier due to climate change
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In mid-July 2026, numerous fast-burning wildfires affected western Ontario and northern Minnesota, resulting in extensive smoke plumes across eastern North America. Here, we conduct a rapid attribution analysis of the 14–21 July smoke event, quantifying the change in wildfire smoke (WFS) PM2.5 concentrations and mortality compared to a counterfactual world without anthropogenic climate change [...]
MELVIS: An open-source web application for computing and modelling the viscosity of volcanic melts
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Volcanology
The viscosity of volcanic melts governs magma transport, eruption dynamics, and a broad range of magmatic processes, so predicting it as a function of temperature, composition, and dissolved water content is central to physical volcanology. Yet no freely accessible tool integrates global machine-learning predictions, physically motivated viscosity equations, and composition-specific models [...]