Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Source composition and historical wind reconstructions: two provenance-associated shifts in the CLIWOC aggregate, 1750--1855
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Applied Mathematics, Other Computer Sciences
Recovering Climate’s History with Artificial Intelligence used the CLIWOC ship-logbook database to argue that sailors’ wind observations reveal a previously undetected shift in global atmospheric circulation between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We reproduce the article's principal annual aggregate from CLIWOC release 2.1 and find that this unstandardized, record-weighted [...]
A satellite blind spot masks crop residue burning across northern India
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Postmonsoon crop residue burning in the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana is a major source of air pollution and air quality degradation across the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP). Recent satellite observations have revealed an apparent inconsistency between declining fire detections and persistent or increasing atmospheric pollution. Here we combine eight years (2018-2025) of fire observations from [...]
Identifying the Antarctic melt contribution to Last Interglacial sea level from Eurasian relative sea-level records
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
High global mean sea level during the Last Interglacial was likely to have largely been driven by Greenland and Antarctic melt, but the timings, rates, and relative magnitudes of these contributions remain elusive. Due to the geometry of ice-sheet fingerprints, relative sea level records in the Eurasian region are likely to be sensitive to ice mass changes in Antarctica while being relatively [...]
Locating the Anthropogenic Drivers of Urban Flooding from Centimetre-Resolution Aerial Imagery: A Reproducible Open-Data Pipeline for the Odaw Basin, Accra
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Recurrent inundation in metropolitan Accra is, on the preponderance of the evidence, an anthropogenic rather than a climatological phenomenon: its proximate determinants are the obstruction of drainage by solid waste and the encroachment of structures onto watercourses. These determinants are metre-scale and therefore invisible to the moderate-resolution satellite imagery on which prior work has [...]
ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Precipitation Outlook and Preliminary Rainfall-Based Flood Screening for Iraq: October 2026–January 2027
Published: 2026-08-12
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
This preprint provides a hydrological and hydrogeological interpretation of ECMWF SEAS5 monthly precipitation forecasts for Iraq from October 2026 through January 2027. The analysis uses the ECMWF System 51 ensemble mean initialized on 1 August 2026. The downloaded time-mean total precipitation rate was converted from metres per second to monthly precipitation depth in millimetres using the [...]
Evidence of rising groundwater and potential for sustainable management amid multi-year droughts in the pastoral regions of northern Kenya
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Groundwater underpins water security in the drylands of East Africa, where climate extremes and increasing groundwater use pose growing water management challenges. This study examines groundwater dynamics in arid northern Kenya using multi-source data that combine in-situ electronic sensor measurements with satellite-based rainfall observations, terrestrial water storage anomalies, and model [...]
Mapping Urban Heat Vulnerability in London: Multi-Scale Geospatial Analysis Using Machine Learning, SHAP Explainability, and Temporal Mortality Data
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Urban heat is a significant cause of mortality. In London, during the summer of 2022, the United Kingdom experienced its first recorded 40°C day, resulting in excess mortality levels not observed since pre-antibiotic influenza seasons. On 19 July 2022, London reached a temperature of 40.3°C, the highest recorded in the United Kingdom, which corresponded to 18,435 excess deaths in England and [...]
Moving fast without breaking things: The benefits of preprinting for CDR research
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences
Advocates of preprinting usually focus on its benefits to individual researchers — more feedback, citations, and visibility. We argue its greater value is collective: preprinting improves scientific coordination, which the carbon dioxide removal field needs in order to move fast without sacrificing rigor.
The Unfinished Map: Observing the Indian Ocean through Model-Corrected, Fleet-Based Sensing
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography
We make decisions about the ocean-the largest and most consequential system on Earth-from a sample so sparse it would be judged inadmissible in almost any other science. Less than one-thousandth of one percent of the deep seafloor has ever been seen by a human eye or camera; most deep-ocean observation has been carried out by a handful of wealthy nations; and the Indian Ocean-which has absorbed a [...]
Quantifying causal effects of green–blue–gray landscape change on urban thermal outcomes: A spatiotemporal causal machine learning analysis across city scales
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Optimizing urban green–blue–gray (UGBG) landscapes has become increasingly important for mitigating surface urban heat island (SUHI) intensity under rapid urbanization. However, the causal effects of landscape pattern changes on SUHI remain poorly quantified, particularly regarding their heterogeneity among spatial configuration, urban scales, and temporal periods. This knowledge gap limits the [...]
Unequal scaling of urban vegetation cooling across sociodemographic groups
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Urban vegetation mitigates heat in cities, but its benefits often reach disadvantaged residents least, an inequality of growing concern as climate change intensifies urban heat. Whether residence-based cooling exposure and its inequality scale systematically with population size and density, as infrastructural and socioeconomic attributes do, remains unclear. Here, we simulate process-based [...]
Competing Health Impacts of Smoke from Wildfires, Agricultural Burning, and Prescribed Fires in California
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences
Wildfire smoke is a dominant threat to air quality and public health in North America, but smoke from other fire sources can also affect health during wildfire seasons. In California, smoke from agricultural burning and prescribed fire co-occurs with wildfire smoke, yet the competing health impacts of these sources remain poorly quantified. To investigate these differential impacts, we estimate [...]
Lead contamination in cassava-based food and tubers (Manihot esculenta Crantz) in French Guiana: evidence for soil-to-plant transfer as the primary source
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
This study investigates lead (Pb) contamination in cassava in French Guiana, focusing on its sources, accumulation processes, and. Previous studies in the area have shown that cassava-based products could be a source of lead in diets, raising concern about human exposure. The results show that cassava tubers often contain lead concentrations and 72% of the analysed samples (n=81) exceed [...]
A community data commons for equitable Earth Science
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Earth observation data are abundant but rarely analysis-ready, and the burden of preparation limits who can participate in science. For the last six years, the Google Earth Engine Community Catalog has closed that gap via community-curated, cloud-hosted, FAIR datasets built without formal funding, advancing discovery and equity worldwide.
Leveraging satellite embeddings and national expert annotations for country-level forest land use mapping
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Spatially explicit information on forest as a land use can support climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation actions, as well as supply-chain regulations, but many countries lack recent forest maps consistent with international definitions. Here, we assess a simple and accessible workflow for country-level Forest/Non-Forest mapping using expert reference labels from the FAO Forest [...]