Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Coastal Climate Change Adaptation: A Review of Engineering, Nature-Based, Governance, and Socio-Economic Adaptation Strategies
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Adaptation is becoming a key part of climate policies, including the Paris Agreement, for coastal areas, which host a large proportion of the world's population. Coastal areas are prone to intensive urbanization and tourism, which can exacerbate the threats of sea-level rise, storm intensification, erosion, and saltwater intrusion. Existing reviews have examined engineering, ecological, [...]
Energy and environmental impacts of rapid data-center expansion in the United Arab Emirates
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Rapid growth in artificial intelligence (AI) is driving major data-center expansion globally, increasing demand on electric power and water-supply systems. Yet the energy and environmental implications of this growth remain comparatively understudied in hot, water-scarce regions such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where announced developments coincide with high cooling requirements, [...]
N2O source partitioning and reduction progress quantified with isotopocule datasets – a review of the modelling strategies
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Nitrous oxide (N2O) isotope signatures provide crucial information for partitioning microbial production pathways, including bacterial, fungal, and nitrifier denitrification, chemo-denitrification and nitrification, as well as for estimating the degree of N2O reduction to N2. However, interpreting the three-dimensional isotope data is highly challenging due to numerous production pathways and [...]
Satellite-Based CO and NOx Emission Estimates from South-Central Chilean Plantation Fires
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present top-down CO and NOx emission estimates for a south-central Chilean fire from Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI observations. Applying the Cross-Sectional Flux method to CO and the Exponentially Modified Gaussian method to NO2, with uncertainty propagated through 500-member Monte Carlo ensembles, we retrieve a median CO flux of 1,273 kg s⁻¹ (95% CI: 676–1,843 kg s⁻¹) and a median NOx flux of 7,505 g [...]
Environmental sustainability studies in US hospitals from 2015-2025: A scoping review of geographic and clinical trends
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
The healthcare sector is responsible for an estimated 8% of the United States’(US) total greenhouse gas emissions, and the US is one of the largest global carbon emitters, responsible for an estimated quarter of all global healthcare emissions. The primary objectives of this scoping review are to understand geographic, medical specialty, pre/post-pandemic publishing trends, and major research [...]
Pedogenic magnetic enhancement in a Latossolo Vermelho (Oxisol) formed on slate in the Brazilian Cerrado: an integrated record of repeated wetting–drying cycles
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seasonal wetting–drying cycles in tropical soils can drive redox reactions that control the formation and transformation of ferrimagnetic iron oxides. In the profile-scale case study, we investigated a well-drained, clayey Latossolo Vermelho (Oxisol/ Ferralsol) developed on weakly magnetic slate in the Brazilian Cerrado. The profile was sampled to 190 cm depth in the dry season (July 2023) and at [...]
A Spatiotemporal Dataset of Urban Water Distribution Schedules
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Urban water supply in several rapidly growing cities in Latin America is managed through intermittent distribution schedules rather than continuous service, often in response to drought or water scarcity conditions. However, these practices are unevenly documented, and publicly available information is largely limited to cities where water authorities disclose distribution schedules. As a result, [...]
MCR-GeoChem: Aharmonized, quality-flagged open compilation of whole-rock and mineral geochemistry for the 1.1 Ga Midcontinent Rift in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Higher Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Nickel, copper, cobalt, and the platinum-group metals are all on the final 2025 U.S. List of Critical Minerals, and the 1.1-billion-year-old Midcontinent Rift around Lake Superior hosts some of the largest domestic resources of them. The rock chemistry needed to study these systems is public but fragmented: it is spread across the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Geochemical Database, [...]
Same computation, different scenes: a single-site comparison of Sentinel-2 L2A composites from Google Earth Engine and Microsoft Planetary Computer
Published: 2026-10-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Google Earth Engine (GEE) and Microsoft Planetary Computer (MPC) distribute Sentinel-2 Level-2A surface reflectance, and their outputs can be combined in one time series. Over a 73 ha cattle farm in northern Colombia, we tested whether the two platforms yield the same parcel-scale vegetation and water indices and, where they differ, whether the difference originates in the product (the L2A [...]
Leveraging satellite data and machine learning to quantify rooftop rainwater harvesting reliability and tank requirements for schools and health care facilities in Uganda
Published: 2026-10-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Many schools and health facilities in Uganda lack a reliable water supply, yet most have roofs that could collect rain. For 41,592 facilities (32,881 schools and 8,711 health facilities), we estimated how much water their roofs can supply, how large a tank each one needs, and how often that supply fails. Roof areas came from AI-derived building footprints (Google Open Buildings v3) and daily [...]
Near-term climate impacts are roughly linear in cumulative CO2 emissions
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Understanding the relationship between CO2 emissions and human well-being is central to informing climate policy. While global temperature change is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, many human outcomes respond nonlinearly to climate variation. As a result, the magnitude of the effect of a quantum of CO2 on these outcomes is ambiguous. Here we demonstrate that the impact of climate change [...]
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 [...]
Fingerprinting PFAS pollution in European surface waters
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Water Resource Management
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) comprise a large group of synthetic chemical substances used across industries and find application in a diverse range of consumer products. Owing to their ubiquitous use and ongoing emissions, such substances are distributed throughout the environment. PFAS and their metabolites pose considerable risk to environmental and human health due to their high [...]
ORBIT: A new, reduced-complexity air quality model for South Asia
Published: 2026-10-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences
Exposure to outdoor air pollution is the most important environmental health risk worldwide, associated with over a million deaths each year in South Asia alone. To understand how to improve air quality, it is necessary to model how changes in emissions affect changes in pollutant concentrations and human health. However, air quality modeling typically demands substantial computation and [...]