Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
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: 2026-10-18
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 [...]
Groundwater Potential Mapping in Northwestern Nigeria: A Comparison of the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Galileo-Enhanced CAT-XGB
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Global water scarcity intensifies the need for high-resolution groundwater assessment tools, yet traditional approaches struggle to reconcile qualitative expert weights with the extensive spatial coverage offered by remote sensing data. This study presents a comparative framework evaluating expert-driven Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (a ten-layer Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)) against [...]
Three gaps for foundation models to address in satellite remote sensing of inland waters
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Long-term Earth observation of inland waters depends on continuity between satellite missions, adequate combinations of spectral, spatial and temporal resolution, and representative calibration and validation datasets. Discontinuities and trade-offs in these components constrain the records available for studying inland waters and their change. We examine three gaps affecting inland water remote [...]
The Spatial Journey: A Visual Narrative of the Keffi to Makurdi Field Trip
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Outdoor Education, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Background: Field-based education is a critical academic component in geographical studies, designed to bridge theoretical knowledge with empirical observation. This paper reports on the development of a visual and interactive geospatial narrative based on a five-day geography educational field trip from Keffi to Makurdi, Nigeria, from the 26th to the 30th of August 2024. Objective: The primary [...]
Temporal Synchronization Determines the Accuracy of Sentinel-2 Turbidity Retrieval: Evidence from Community-Based Monitoring of the Buriganga River, Dhaka
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Community-based environmental organizations require continuous water quality data but are constrained by the cost and labor of physical sampling. Satellite remote sensing offers a free alternative, yet validation studies of inland waters frequently report weak agreement between satellite indices and ground measurements, and the cause of that disagreement is rarely isolated. This study analyzed 28 [...]
A vertical vegetation structure model of the Earth
Published: 2026-10-06
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Wood Science and Pulp, Paper Technology
Knowing the global distribution of vegetation structure is an essential prerequisite to better quantify, model, and manage carbon, water, energy, and biodiversity in the Earth system. Despite its recognized importance, vertical structure measurements remain sparse at global scales, limiting our understanding of the links between structure and ecosystem functions and resilience. Here we present [...]
Climate resilience from long-term low till adoption in US farms
Published: 2026-10-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
Low-intensity tillage (low till) has expanded rapidly in the United States since 2000. Evidence on its yield impacts has come mainly from field experiments and has been limited to short time horizons. Using satellite-based observations from more than 40 million field-year pairs across the U.S. Corn Belt from 1999-2023, we demonstrate that yield gains continue to accrue with longer duration of [...]
Fixed-ground multisensor monitoring resolves longitudinal vegetation condition and fuel-state structure in Southern California chaparral and oak scenes
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Sciences, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Wildfire-relevant vegetation and fuel conditions evolve through interacting changes in vegetation condition, three-dimensional fuel structure, thermal response, and atmospheric drying, yet these dimensions are commonly monitored separately. This study evaluated repeated fixed-ground multisensor monitoring at two fixed vegetation scenes in Placerita Canyon, California. Multispectral imaging, [...]
Does low-carbon transition encourage equity principles ?
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
This study investigates researchers’ research practices using the Ma Terre (MTr) serious game, in which participants adopt fictional, but realistic, characters representing research team members. Across eighty five Ma Terre workshops gathering three hundred academics issued from twelve research domains, teams negotiated measures to reduce their carbon footprint by 50%, considering travel research [...]