Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
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: 2026-08-26
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 [...]
Adalar at the Eastern Marmara Seismic Gap: The August 2026 Earthquake Cluster and Its Implications for Seismic Hazard near Istanbul
Published: 2026-08-21
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: 2026-08-17
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 [...]