Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Multi-Sensor Satellite-Based Retrospective Early-Warning Assessment of the 26 August 2026 Flood Event in the Langtang Region of Nepal
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Rapid-onset floods in high-mountain environments can be difficult to anticipate because their triggering mechanisms may involve interactions among precipitation, glacierized terrain, surface-water dynamics, and sudden geomorphological disturbances. This study presents a retrospective multi-sensor satellite assessment of the flood event reported in the Langtang region of Nepal on 26 August 2026. [...]
Sea-Level Change in Asia since the Last Glacial Maximum
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
As a ‘far-field’ area, distal from former ice sheets, Asia is minimally influenced by the glacial isostatic adjustment process. Therefore, Relative sea-level (RSL) data from Asia, recorded by various geological proxies, provide essential constraints on the history of ice-equavilent sea-level changes. The global mean sea-level has risen over 130 m on average since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), [...]
A tale of two temperature extremes: exploring how exposure to extreme heat or cold affects mental health and wellbeing in the UK
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Background and Objective The UK's climate change vulnerability to extreme temperatures, hotter summers and milder winters, and emerging evidence on climate change and mental health require further empirical research. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between exposure to extreme temperatures and mental health and wellbeing outcomes across the UK. We also examined whether [...]
Bidirectional enhanced quantile gated recurrent unit for short-term forecasting of PM2.5 with emphasis on extreme events in Sri Lanka
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Air quality forecasting is critical for mitigating the health impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). This study introduces a hybrid deep learning model, the bidirectional enhanced quantile gated recurrent unit (BEQ-GRU), for short-term forecasting of PM2.5 concentrations with explicit emphasis on extreme pollution occurrences. This model was applied to forecast PM2.5 levels in two high-risk [...]
Investigation of Drivers and Sources of Potential Harmful Algal Blooms in Lake Anna, Virginia, 2023–24
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Algal blooms in freshwater reservoirs are an increasing concern because of the risk to aquatic ecosystem health, recreational use, and water quality. Among the taxa that comprise an algal bloom, cyanobacteria are of particular concern due to the potential to produce toxic compounds which can cause acute and chronic illness in humans if ingested through contaminated water or shellfish. When toxins [...]
Unsupervised Clustering for Identifying Dusty Days and Their Sources: A Long-Term Data Study in Sanandaj, Iran
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences
Dust storms are a persistent environmental hazard in the Middle East, yet long-term monitoring remains limited by sparse ground observations and the lack of objective, reproducible event definitions. This study develops a transferable, data-driven framework for objectively identifying dusty days in data-scarce regions and explicitly addresses two key issues: defining dust events using defensible [...]
The Uncertainty Landscape Beyond Variance
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Mathematics, Statistics and Probability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Modern science has become good at measuring uncertainty. Across statistics, artificial intelligence, economics, Earth observation, environmental modelling and decision science, researchers increasingly invoke uncertainty when interpreting evidence, evaluating predictions and supporting decisions. These disciplines often use the word uncertainty to describe conceptually different scientific [...]
Integrated soil profile mapping reveals regional patterns of soil condition across Southern African agricultural lands
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Applied Statistics, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Statistical Models
Soil information at regional scales remains limited in Africa despite its importance for sustainable agricultural management, food security and land degradation assessment. Existing digital soil mapping approaches commonly model soil properties as independent depth layers and apply depth harmonisation after prediction, limiting their capacity to characterise changes in soil condition. Here, we [...]
Data Test of a Hydro-Kinematic State Graph for Landslide Forecasting
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Statistics and Probability
A graph model can make landslide-monitoring relationships explicit, but a graph is not automatically more informative than a well-regularized time-series model. This study tests that distinction on the publicly released Lamosano landslide record from northeastern Italy. The processed dataset contains 161 observations of 11-day horizontal InSAR differential displacement and rainfall from 10 April [...]
RainCheck Africa: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Gridded Precipitation Dataset Performance at Continental Scale
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Gridded rainfall products are indispensable for water resource management, agricultural monitoring, and disaster risk reduction across Africa, yet no systematic synthesis of their performance has been conducted. We present RainCheck Africa: a PRISMA-compliant systematic review and meta-analysis of 72 peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2025 evaluating satellite, reanalysis, and [...]
Numerical modeling and hazard analysis of Kuwait dust storm events using WRF Chemistry model
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Dust storms have a negative impact on socio-economic events in Kuwait, including traffic accidents, seaport closures, airport shutdowns, and flight delays, and agriculture degradation. From the diurnal analysis of weather parameters, it was noticed that dust storms were more severe from noon to late evening hours and gradually slowed down during the night hours. Sometimes, these strong dust [...]
What can satellite embedding fields tell us about shallow coral-reef habitats? A decodability survey of AlphaEarth over the Great Barrier Reef
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Annual satellite embedding fields compress a year of multi-sensor observation into a 64-dimensional vector per 10 m pixel, globally; whether they retain ecologically meaningful information about the submerged reef benthos is untested. We conducted a registered decodability survey of the AlphaEarth Foundations embedding over shallow (< 10 m) Great Barrier Reef habitats: every candidate output [...]
Early warning signals of tipping points: A deep learning approach to direction and timing
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The crossing of climate tipping points poses serious risk to life on Earth due to the impacts they cause, and their irreversibility. These systems generally exhibit critical slowing down on their approach to tipping point, or bifurcation, which can be detected by looking for changes in statistical properties of a time series from the system, such as an increasing lag-1 autocorrelation or [...]
AquaContam: machine-learning models of drinking-water contamination learn who is monitored as much as where contamination occurs
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Machine learning informs drinking-water monitoring, yet administrative data record the monitoring process as much as the contamination. Using AquaContam (over 4 million samples from 95,223 U.S. water systems and ambient monitoring locations), we find provenance proxies dominate feature attributions, and an apparent lead-model AUROC of 0.962 is largely a target- leakage artifact (corrected skill [...]
On the quieting of glaciohydraulic tremor
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The subglacial hydraulic system strongly modulates glacier motion, yet the links between subglacial water flow, basal pressure, and short-lived drainage reorganization remain difficult to observe directly. Seismology can track seismic power generated by turbulent subglacial water flow, known as glaciohydraulic tremor (GHT). At Rhône Glacier, Switzerland, previous observations documented periods [...]