Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
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 [...]
Adalar at the Eastern Marmara Seismic Gap: The August 2026 Earthquake Cluster and Its Implications for Seismic Hazard near Istanbul
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering Science and Materials, Environmental Sciences, Geotechnical Engineering, Higher Education, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Engineering, Risk Analysis, Science and Mathematics Education, Structural Engineering
The eastern Marmara Sea and Adalar sector lie close to İstanbul and the western North Anatolian Fault, where earthquake-source processes interact with strong basin and site effects. This study integrates a reconciled earthquake catalog, waveform-quality measures, spatial statistics, trial hypocentral relocation, reconnaissance focal mechanisms, point-source Coulomb stress screening, and published [...]
Satellite-Based Assessment of Terrestrial Water Storage Change and Groundwater Stress in Zhob District, Balochistan
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Groundwater underpins domestic supply and irrigated agriculture across much of Balochistan, Pakistan, and satellite-based subsidence studies have documented severe groundwater-related stress around Quetta, Gulistan, Pishin, Mastung, and Kalat districts. Zhob District, in northern Balochistan, is comparably dependent on tubewell and karez irrigation but has not been covered by any published [...]
ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Precipitation Outlook and Hydrological-Hydrogeological Assessment for the Middle East: August 2026-January 2027
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Higher Education, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
This preprint presents a regional hydrological and hydrogeological interpretation of the ECMWF SEAS5 System 51 ensemble-mean precipitation forecast initialized on 1 August 2026 for the Middle East and adjacent portions of the analysis domain. The supplied NetCDF field is time-mean total precipitation rate (tprate; m s^-1), converted to monthly precipitation depth (mm/month) using the actual [...]
Source-composition sensitivity in historical marine wind observations: a CLIWOC case study, 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 [...]