Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Applied Statistics
Hearing the heat: a proof-of-concept study of nonlinear sound measures for distinguishing phases of rapid organic decomposition
Published: 2026-11-07
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Dynamic Systems, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Non-linear Dynamics, Physical and Environmental Geography, Soil Science
Acoustic recording can follow decomposition non-destructively, but which acoustic measures carry process information is largely untested. In a proof-of-concept experiment, four nonlinear complexity measures and six conventional ecoacoustic indices were compared in eight octave bands, using 150 recordings from five buckets of one vermicompost-hay batch during one mesophilic heating-cooling cycle. [...]
Lithologic Period Predicts Yttrium Enrichment in Western United States Stream Sediments
Published: 2026-11-01
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Screening ground for heavy rare earth prospecting potential at regional scale depends upon archived geochemistry, because favorable intrusive terrain in the western U.S. greatly exceeds what any drilling program could evaluate directly. This research examined whether the lithologic period of intrusive igneous terrain can reliably predict acid-leachable yttrium using only the stream sediment [...]
Sampling Uncertainty is Critical for Setting Forecast-Based Anticipatory Action Triggers
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Risk Analysis
As of 2022, nearly 5 million smallholder farmers across more than a dozen countries are covered by Anticipatory Action (AA) programs. AA programs are aid schemes triggered when seasonal forecasts of precipitation fall below a locally-determined drought threshold. These thresholds are generally calculated to meet a donor- or government-specified expected trigger frequency. However, the [...]
Hydrometeorological Consistency and Structural Differences in High-Resolution Atmospheric Forcing Products over the Gulf Coast
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology
Kilometer-scale meteorological forcing products are increasingly used in hydrologic applications, yet comparable resolution does not ensure consistent atmospheric structure or derived diagnostics. This study compares AORC and NLDAS-3 across the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast (Texas to the Carolinas) from 2001–2020 using a common spatial footprint and paired days. Relative to AORC, NLDAS-3 exhibits [...]
Universality and Information Loss in the Stratigraphic Record
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Statistical Models, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics, Stratigraphy
Sedimentary rocks are the main archive of Earth history, yet most of the time they span is not represented by rock. Material deposited at any moment survives only if the depositional surface never later erodes below it, so the stratigraphic column keeps only the lowest levels that a fluctuating surface will reach in the future. We treat this rule as a filter on a randomly evolving surface and [...]
Probabilistic Streamflow Forecasts for Mississippi River Navigation Risk and Parametric Insurance
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Mississippi River navigation is disrupted by both low and high water extremes, yet shippers, ports, and terminals lack a simple instrument to transfer that risk. We test whether probabilistic forecasts of monthly streamflow can provide useful navigation-risk information. Using pretrained Chronos-2 at three major Mississippi River subbasin outlets, we compute navigation risk probabilities, [...]
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 [...]
Climate Sensitivity from 21st-Century Trends in Earth's Energy Imbalance
Published: 2026-09-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Earth's energy imbalance has increased rapidly since continuous satellite observations began in 2001, raising concern that equilibrium climate sensitivity may be higher than in recent assessments. Here we use energy-budget trends over 2006–2024 to estimate climate sensitivity in a Bayesian framework, accounting for uncertainty in observations, forcing, variability, and pattern effects. Climate [...]
Was the Pre-Event SWIR Anomaly at Tsangbu Ri a Genuine Glacier-Collapse Precursor? A Calibrated Multi-Glacier Test of the 2026 Case
Published: 2026-09-19
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Geographic Information Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology, Planetary Geology, Planetary Glaciology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Tectonics and Structure
On 26 August 2026 a compound bedrock-and-glacier failure on the northern flank of the Langtang Lirung–Tsangbu Ri (Kimshung) massif, Nepal–China border, generated a rock–ice avalanche and a catastrophic downstream flood along the Bhotekoshi–Trishuli river system. A pre-event Sentinel-2 shortwave-infrared (SWIR2–NIR–Red) composite (12 August 2026) shows a sharply bounded, strongly saturated [...]
Approaches and challenges in estimating economic loss from tsunami damage models
Published: 2026-09-17
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences
Tsunami damage assessment as a field has been steadily gaining momentum in the scientific community, and one of the most common ways in which damage has been quantified is by fragility functions. However, how tsunami damage models can be applied to practical disaster risk management is still relatively underexplored. An important aspect of disaster risk management is loss estimations. Loss [...]
What Did the Destruction of the Kakhovka Dam Do to Vegetation? Separating Flood, Reservoir and Irrigation Effects with Satellite Data
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
The Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine was destroyed on 6 June 2023. This could have changed vegetation in three ways: through the flood below the dam, the draining of the reservoir, and the loss of water for the irrigation canals. All three happened inside an active war zone. I tested each pathway separately with MODIS NDVI at 250 m resolution for 2016–2024. Treated land was defined by what [...]
Deep-learning-based denoising and interpolation of small displacements caused by fault slip using InSAR and GNSS data: Application to the 2019 Mw 6.2 Hyuga-nada earthquake
Published: 2026-08-31
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences
In recent years, deep learning techniques have become important tools in Solid Earth science, including geodesy. Previous studies have applied deep learning techniques to synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data, which are two major observation techniques of satellite geodesy, to mitigate noise or detect small signals. Because InSAR and [...]
Climate change has intensified exceptional El Niño events like the 2026/27 forecast
Published: 2026-08-29
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
Extreme El Niño events disrupt weather across much of the globe, with adverse effects on agriculture, fisheries and economic output that persist for several years. Event attribution routinely quantifies the human influence on individual heatwaves, droughts and floods, but its application to the El Niño events that drive many of them has been much more limited. Here we investigate the 2026/27 El [...]
Integrated soil profile mapping reveals regional patterns of soil condition across Southern African agricultural lands
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Statistics, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Statistical Models
Soil information at regional scales remains limited in Africa despite its importance for sustainable agricultural management, food security and land degradation assessment. Existing digital soil mapping approaches commonly model soil properties as independent depth layers and apply depth harmonisation after prediction, limiting their capacity to characterise changes in soil condition. Here, we [...]
Data Test of a Hydro-Kinematic State Graph for Landslide Forecasting
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Statistics and Probability
A graph model can make landslide-monitoring relationships explicit, but a graph is not automatically more informative than a well-regularized time-series model. This study tests that distinction on the publicly released Lamosano landslide record from northeastern Italy. The processed dataset contains 161 observations of 11-day horizontal InSAR differential displacement and rainfall from 10 April [...]