Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Impacts of Potential Solar Radiation Modification: Systematic Review Reveals Challenges and Opportunities
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences
Solar radiation modification (SRM) is a proposed temporary intervention to limit global warming while mitigation efforts continue. Understanding its potential consequences for human and natural systems is essential for informed deliberations. We conducted a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature on SRM impacts published through May 2024, identifying 289 studies, including 261 primary [...]
Spatially Distributed Land-Use Efficiency Assessment under SDG Indicator 11.3.1: The Case of Greater Manila Area, Philippines
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 11.3.1 assesses urban land-use efficiency (LUE) through the relationship between land consumption rate (LCR) and population growth rate (PGR), commonly expressed as LCRPGR. However, city-level implementation produces a single value that can mask where efficient or inefficient urban development occurs. This study develops and demonstrates a spatially [...]
Two decades of kilometer-scale daily PM2.5 from satellite observations and machine learning reveal geographically diverging exposure in Ghana
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major contributor to global burden of disease, yet air quality data remain sparse in many low- and middle-income countries, limiting nationwide monitoring and effective policy development. We address this gap by developing a high-resolution gridded (1 km × 1 km) dataset for daily surface PM2.5 concentrations in Ghana from 2005 to 2025 by training [...]
Climate overshoot and the insurability frontier: peak stress, domestic capacity, and market retreat risk
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Sciences
Climate overshoot can create mid-century peaks in climate stress before end-century temperatures stabilize, but its implications for insurance availability remain poorly understood. We assess subnational insurance market exit risk under overshoot across 1,590 first-order administrative regions in 88 countries, covering 4.54 billion people. Combining ADM1-level multi-hazard climate stress, an [...]
Direct mapping of plantation forest aboveground biomass change with deep learning and SAR-optical fusion
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation
Accurately tracking changes in forest aboveground biomass (ΔAGB) is necessary for understanding global carbon dynamics. Traditional approaches estimate ΔAGB indirectly by differencing two independent biomass predictions, compounding uncertainty and reducing accuracy. Here, we develop a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) machine learning framework that uses multi-sensor fusion of Sentinel-1 C-band SAR, [...]
Comparing Process-Based and Machine Learning Models for Streamflow Prediction in the Kaligandaki River Basin, Nepal
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Reliable daily streamflow prediction is critical for hydropower operations, flood risk management, and irrigation planning in monsoon-dominated Himalayan river basins. While both process-based and machine learning (ML) approaches have been used for such tasks, systematic comparisons that decompose the sources of performance differences remain scarce. This study evaluates seven configurations: a [...]
Annual electricity access rate dataset for Africa from 2000-2021
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Accurate and spatially explicit electricity access data are essential for electrification planning and policy evaluation in Africa, yet existing data are often survey-based, infrequent, and temporally inconsistent. This study presents a harmonized Electricity Access Rate (EAR) dataset for Africa spanning 2000-2021, derived from satellite-based nighttime luminosity observations and gridded [...]
Global Temperature Anomalies in Practice: An Open, Reproducible Framework for Baseline Harmonisation and ENSO-Aware Visualisation
Published: 2026-06-01
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences
We present a reproducible pipeline for downloading, processing, and harmonising global temperature anomaly series from HadCRUT5, GISTEMP, NOAAGlobalTemp, Berkeley Earth, and ERA5. All datasets are aligned to a common 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline to enable direct comparison. The workflow also integrates the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) to annotate El Niño and La Niña phases in the figures, [...]
Engineering AI-Assisted Client-Side Scientific Workflows: WebGPU Inference Architecture and Framework for Privacy-Preserving Hydrological Analysis
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Software Engineering
Deep learning has demonstrated strong potential for improving hydrological predictions, yet its practical adoption remains limited by software complexity, infrastructure requirements, data governance constraints, and fragmented analytical workflows. This study presents Hydro AI Lab, an AI-assisted client-side scientific workflow platform that enables end-to-end hydrological analysis, including [...]
HydroModelSpec: Toward Standardized Machine Learning Model Exchange in Hydrology
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Software Engineering
The rapid growth of deep learning models for hydrological forecasting (e.g., CNNs, LSTMs, Transformers) has created a fragmented ecosystem where trained models remain tied to their original frameworks, environments, and institutions. Despite substantial investments in model development, the hydrological community lacks a generalized structure for packaging models with their architecture, training [...]
Awareness and Action: An Exploration Between Public Perception and Space Industry Priorities Regarding Sustainability
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
As issues regarding sustainability continue to grow more urgent and prevalent to everyday life, it is important to recognize whether society fully understands what is occurring. The low earth orbit is at threat of overcongestion, and the environment is experiencing higher rates of pollution due to rocket launches, calling for the need for the government and public to engage in this issue. [...]
Resolving the SAI Trilemma with a Novel Core–Shell Mineral Aerosol: DoloSil-20, a Silica-Passivated Dolomite Architecture for Simultaneous Optical Efficiency, Thermal Neutrality, and Ozone Safety
Published: 2026-05-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Conventional stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) strategies based on liquid sulfate aerosols (H2SO4.H2O) introduce well-documented risks of catalytic ozone destruction and stratospheric near-infrared heating. From a materials-science perspective, the core challenge is one of multi-objective material selection: identifying a particle composition that simultaneously optimizes optical performance, [...]
NOVEL & RAPID PROCESSING OF UAS IMAGERY FOR TARGETED CYANOBACTERIAL HARMFUL ALGAL BLOOM SAMPLING
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are an efficient way to monitor and sample algal biomass including cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (CyanoHABs). However, conventional methods to create a UAS orthophoto of homogeneous water surfaces often produce a patchy, smoothed, or spatially inaccurate output. In this study, we developed a novel method to interpolate a spectral index from a central pixel in [...]
Development and Evaluation of the High-Resolution MUSICA UK Domain: A Case Study of Global and Regional Biomass Burning Impacts
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Regional air quality models provide insights into local pollution and exposure, but limitations in representing large-scale atmospheric processes and long-range transport can introduce inconsistencies across spatial scales, which can be addressed using multi-scale chemical transport models. We develop the first UK-specific regionally refined grid (UKne30×16; ∼7 km), alongside a global uniform [...]
Wildfire smoke offsets decades of progress in reducing ozone exposure across the United States
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences
Ground-level ozone (O3) pollution has declined in the U.S., yet the progress has stalled in recent years, coinciding with increasing wildfire smoke. Using ensemble machine learning models trained on surface observations, we develop a gridded daily smoke O3 dataset across the contiguous U.S. from 2006-2023. We estimate that wildfire smoke placed an additional 29 million people each year in areas [...]