Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Geomorphology
From Arctic UAS Reconnaissance to Planetary Rotorcraft Science: An evidence tracking workflow for linking aerial observations with ground investigation at FMARS
Published: 2026-11-11
Subjects: Geomorphology, Other Planetary Sciences
Aerial reconnaissance can place a ground target within its terrain context, but scientific interpretation requires a traceable connection between the image, its processing history, and the field record. This technical case study describes an evidence tracking workflow for imagery associated with the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island, Canada. The available sources include [...]
GEM-15: Global surface and terrain elevation models (15 meters) from sub-meter optical stereo imagery
Published: 2026-11-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Existing open global digital elevation models (DEMs) are limited to 30 m resolution, blur fine-scale urban and canopy structure, and rely on satellite missions flown between 2000 and 2015. We present Google's Global Elevation Models at 15 m (GEM-15), to our knowledge the first openly available near-global multi-layer elevation dataset at 15 m grid spacing. GEM-15 aggregates native 0.5 m optical [...]
Inferred vegetation during Australia’s dune whorl formation
Published: 2026-11-10
Subjects: Geomorphology
Australia’s vegetated linear dune crests are oriented in an anticlockwise whorl covering over a third of the continent. The mismatch between its crest orientations and modern sand-flux directions has been interpreted as evidence of a northward wind shift during the Last Glacial Maximum. However, this interpretation implicitly assumes constant vegetation cover via the threshold wind speed for sand [...]
Satellite data for the integrated modelling of Watershed-Coast System morphodynamics in a changing climate: a critical review and a structured framework
Published: 2026-11-09
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Oceanography, Water Resource Management
Watershed-Coast Systems (WACS) integrate the watershed and the coast as a coupled geomorphological entity whose evolution depends on climate, terrestrial, and marine drivers acting at very different scales. Modelling the morphodynamics of WACS in a changing climate is a recognised but uneven endeavour: satellite-data use has matured for inland hydrology and for coastal observation taken in [...]
Mapping landslide change and volume with repeat airborne LiDAR after the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna event: slope-dependent detection limits and lowered areas
Published: 2026-10-31
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing
Landslide inventories are validated against repeat topography by comparing the ground that changes beyond a detection limit inside mapped polygons with the same fraction on stable ground. Stable ground is gentler than landslides, and LiDAR noise grows with slope. We measure the consequence for the May 2023 Emilia-Romagna event, Italy, with four pairs of 0.5 m airborne LiDAR on 919 river-corridor [...]
Threshold Sensitivity and Reference Uncertainty in Sentinel-1 Inundation Mapping: The July 2021 Mahad Flood
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is widely used to map flood inundation under cloud cover, but backscatter-based mapping is sensitive to processing choices, and quantitative evaluation depends on reference data that are often unavailable. This paper examines both issues for the July 2021 flood at Mahad, Maharashtra, India. Three Sentinel-1A VV/VH scenes from one descending orbit, acquired on 10 [...]
SCI-DEM: A Method for Generating Digital Beach Surfaces from Tide and Waterline Timeseries
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Oceanography
We present SCI-DEM, a method for deriving Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of intertidal beach surfaces, profiles and beach widths from time-series waterlines using low-cost coastal CCTV cameras and modelled water levels. SCI-DEM builds on two established components: a waterline extraction method built on a semantic segmentation model, and a camera-pose-estimated homography, used to georeference [...]
Erosion-induced momentum production and system acceleration govern landslide mobility
Published: 2026-10-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geotechnical Engineering, Glaciology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Sedimentology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Erosion can fundamentally alter landslide acceleration through the produced momentum. However, existing analytical landslide velocity models do not account for the energy dissipation associated with erosion-induced system acceleration. Here, I present a novel, complete dynamical velocity model for erosive landslides that incorporates two intrinsically coupled mechanically essential processes: [...]
NepalDTM: A National 8-Metre Bare-Earth Digital Terrain Model of Nepal from Multi-Source Satellite Data Fusion
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
NepalDTM is an open bare-earth elevation model of Nepal stored on an 8 m grid. Where the NASA High Mountain Asia 8 m stereo mosaic has a usable height, that mosaic is the surface. Elsewhere the surface is Copernicus GLO-30. A histogram gradient-boosting model, trained on 6,230,548 ICESat-2 points and 7,035,904 GEDI points, predicts how far the surface sits above the ground and subtracts that [...]
Post-event information in annual satellite embeddings inflates the apparent performance of landslide susceptibility models: a paired audit of 18 events
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Geomorphology
Landslide susceptibility models are often evaluated by spatial cross-validation on the inventory of a single event. When predictors come from annual satellite products, the layer for the event year can also record the event's aftermath. We audited 18 earthquake- and rainfall-triggered events with 61,402 landslide locations, changing only the input year of AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings while [...]
A steadily flowing glacier and no detectable precursor before the 11 October 2026 Budhi Gandaki rock–ice avalanche and flood, Nepal
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
On 11 October 2026 at about 04:20 local time, a rock–ice avalanche at the head of the Ungilung Khola, on the southern slopes of Chamar (7,165 m) in Gorkha District, Nepal, became a debris flow and flood that travelled down the Syar Khola and the Budhi Gandaki. I reconstruct the event from free satellite data (Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Landsat 8/9, ITS_LIVE and NISAR), official records and my own [...]
Active hazardous slow faults drive drainage evolution in the Atacama Desert
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Tectonics and Structure
The Atacama Desert of the Central Andean forearc is the driest non-polar region on Earth, where extremely low erosion rates preserve geomorphic markers over Myr timescales. Between 19°S and 20°S, subtle Quaternary east-vergent reverse faults deform the west-sloping landscape and disrupt drainage development. This setting provides a unique opportunity to investigate fault evolution, uplift [...]
Quantifying volumetric erosion from symbolic expression of landslide morphology
Published: 2026-10-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Landslide volumetric erosion is fundamental to regional sediment budgets and downstream hazard assessment, yet accurately constraining material mobilization remains a primary bottleneck in Earth-system research. Legacy area–volume relations introduce substantial uncertainty when applied across heterogeneous landslide populations. Here, we examine whether the erosional and accumulation (i.e., [...]
What constitutes fine-scale geodiversity? Taxonomic geodiversity mapping across environmental gradients in a sub-Arctic mountain environment
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science
The integration of geodiversity information, i.e., the diversity of abiotic features in the Earth surface and subsurface, into assessments of the sustainability and resilience of natural environments and ecosystems is increasingly considered important. However, geodiversity data is highly scale-dependent and there is an urgent need to find optimal ways on how geodiversity should be quantified and [...]
Three-Dimensional Numerical Modeling of Glacier Flow and U-Shaped Valley Evolution in Subtropical Taiwan
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Glacial erosion plays a critical role in shaping alpine topography,yet the coupled effects of ice deformation, basal sliding, andbedrock erosion on millennial-scale valley morphodynamics remainchallenging to quantify. This study presents three-dimensionalsimulations of glacier dynamics and bed evolution in Xue MountainGlacial Cirque No.~2, Taiwan, over an effective glaciation timescaleof 9~ka. [...]