Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Sciences
Detecting industrial ammonia and ethylene point sources with the thermal bands of Landsat 8 and 9
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Industrial point sources of ammonia (NH₃) and ethylene (C₂H₄) are poorly constrained in current inventories, in part because satellites tend to offer either fine spatial detail or frequent revisits. We show that the two thermal-infrared bands of the Landsat 8 and 9 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), though built for land-surface monitoring, can detect and spatially resolve such plumes at 100 m [...]
Quantifying Watershed Criticality via Deep Learning and Explainable AI for Groundwater Resilience
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is a vital freshwater resource that supports drinking water supply, agricultural sustainability, ecosystem functioning, and drought resilience. As water scarcity and climate change impacts intensify, sustainable groundwater management plays an important role in groundwater management, with groundwater storage (GWS) acting as a key indicator of groundwater resilience. This study [...]
Increasing lithium mining could threaten endemic species in biodiversity hotspots
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Electric vehicles (EVs) are being rapidly deployed as a technological solution to the climate crisis. However, mineral extraction to supply EV battery production can cause serious environmental damage, threatening ecosystems and biodiversity from local to global scales. Lithium, a key EV battery component, is experiencing an enormous mining boom, which could drive species population declines and [...]
Does Free Allocation Slow Decarbonization ? Installation-Level Evidence from the EU ETS, Phases III and IV
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability
Installations at high risk of carbon leakage receive free allowances from the European Union Emissions Trading System. Free allowances are allocated to prevent energy-intensive factories from relocating outside the EU. However, whether free allocation slows decarbonization remains an open question. In this paper, I test this question directly. The panel was built at the installation-level. The [...]
Mapping ethylene and acetylene plumes using satellite high-resolution imaging spectrometers that exploit the SWIR spectrum
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Ethylene (C2H4) and acetylene (C2H2) are reactive hydrocarbons that degrade air quality through ozone formation and atmospheric oxidation. However, space-based monitoring of plumes from these gases remains largely unexplored. Here, we demonstrate, for the first time, that ethylene and acetylene point-source emissions can be detected and quantified using shortwave infrared (SWIR) imaging [...]
Coastal plain retention modulates flashflood chlorophylla anomalies in the Red Sea: a CPRI based multisite analysis
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The eastern Red Sea coastal margin is among the most oligotrophic large marine ecosystems on Earth, where episodic nutrient pulses from flash floods can transiently fuel phytoplankton blooms. Yet, the extent to which upstream coastal-plain geomorphology modulates the magnitude of these flood-driven chlorophylla (Chla) responses remains poorly quantified. We tested the hypothesis that narrower [...]
Spectrally structured CNN encoding for interpretable and edge-ready fractional vegetation cover mapping using UAS multispectral and imaging spectroscopy
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing
Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is a key indicator of semi-arid ecosystem condition, but non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) remains difficult to map because dry or senescent vegetation, litter, woody debris, and standing dead material can overlap spectrally with photosynthetic vegetation (PV) and bare ground (BE), especially where shadows, exposed bare earth surfaces, and mixed vegetation-soil [...]
Resolving microscale near surface temperature variability during a heatwave using a dense sensor network
Published: 2026-06-29
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
High-resolution measurements of near-surface temperature are essential for understanding environmental responses to extreme weather events, yet are rarely available from dense, regularly spaced in situ measurement grids. Here, we analyse temperature measurements derived from a dense network of over 3,000 nodal seismometers deployed across a 6 km² area in North Yorkshire, UK, during the July 2022 [...]
Translation and commentary on Carl Eduard Ney’s (1893/1894) Ueber die Messung des an den Schäften der Bäume herabfliessenden Regenwassers
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resource Management
Stemflow is now recognized as a hydrologically consequential pathway, yet much of twentieth-century forest hydrology treated it as negligible. This paper revisits a counterpoint, a formal exchange regarding stemflow between Government and Forestry Councilor C.E. Ney and Imperial-Royal Trainee Dr. E. Hoppe at the first Congress of the International Union of Forestry Research Stations (Mariabrunn, [...]
Air quality and health impacts of Data Center electricity demand in the United States
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is associated with a substantial growth in electricity demand from data centers in the US, yet the resulting air quality and public health impacts remain poorly quantified. Data centers represent large, near-continuous demands that fundamentally alter power system dispatch and emissions. To quantify the ambient air pollution and associated premature [...]
Where to Watch the Water: Multi-Sensor Network Design Optimization for Inland Flood Detection
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Inland flood detection is often constrained less by sensor availability than by where sensors are placed along branching river networks, especially in ungauged headwaters where floods often initiate. We present a three-phase, decisionfocused framework for designing basin-by-basin multi-sensor flood detection networks that coordinate water-level, discharge, and camera sensors while explicitly [...]
A Phanerozoic Atlas of Earth’s Atmosphere, Surface, and Interior Derived from the PANALESIS Plate Tectonic Model
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Other Environmental Sciences, Tectonics and Structure
Reconstructing the Earth system evolution through deep time requires spatially consistent, multi‑layer datasets that integrate geological, geophysical, and climatic information. Here we present a unified, high‑resolution (10×10km) global dataset describing the Earth’s evolution over the past 545 million years. This atlas provides 45 time slices spanning the Phanerozoic, each including quantified [...]
AEF-Econ: Toward Plug-and-Play Socioeconomic Foundation Embeddings from AlphaEarth for Urban Remote Sensing
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) unify global remote sensing foundation embeddings through multimodal self-supervised learning, but their pretraining focuses on physical land-surface signals, limiting plug-and-play use in socioeconomic tasks. We integrate seven heterogeneous data streams across 36 Chinese cities over eight years—AEF embeddings, population, nighttime lights, remote sensing indices, [...]
Ecosystem Metabolism as an Early Warning Indicator of Lake Algal Blooms
Published: 2026-06-15
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Algal blooms represent ecosystem state shifts that degrade drinking water, restrict recreation, threaten public health, and lower property values. Detecting blooms in advance on management relevant timescales of days to weeks can support proactive intervention. Early warning statistics derived from indicator time series offer a framework for detecting state shifts, but the use of lake metabolic [...]
An efficient method for deriving volatility basis sets from thermodenuder and particle levitation data.
Published: 2026-06-12
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Transport Phenomena
Deriving a volatility basis set (VBS) from measurements of particle evaporation in a thermodenuder or single-particle levitation apparatus has traditionally relied on repeated numerical solution of the evaporation equations to find the VBS that best reproduces observed particle sizes. This approach is computationally demanding and offers little insight into the factors that control the retrieval. [...]