Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
Remote sensing of ammonia point sources at high spatial resolution with satellite-based imaging spectrometers
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring
Ammonia (NH3) emissions play a key role in air pollution and the disruption of the nitrogen cycle. Global emissions of ammonia are expected to increase in the future, making their monitoring essential to better understand their impacts and to support effective environmental policies. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of satellite imaging spectrometers operating in the shortwave [...]
Performance validation of the GHGSat Methane Constellation via controlled releases
Published: 2026-06-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring
Satellite remote sensing has become an important tool for detecting, quantifying, and attributing methane emissions, yet a rigorous, condition-dependent characterization of point-source imager performance has not previously been established, despite being essential to support its use in regulatory and voluntary reporting frameworks. We present a comprehensive performance assessment of the GHGSat [...]
Novel Source Apportionment Methodologies for Secondary PM2.5 during Extreme Wintertime Meteorological Conditions in the Western U.S.
Published: 2026-06-14
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Traditional receptor-oriented source apportionment methods, such as positive matrix factorization and chemical mass balance, rely on vector-component analyses of robust observational records or pre-determined source fingerprints, respectively. These methods may struggle to resolve sources that are similar in composition due to source fingerprint collinearity. It is important to isolate [...]
Spatially Distributed Land-Use Efficiency Assessment under SDG Indicator 11.3.1: The Case of Greater Manila Area, Philippines
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 11.3.1 assesses urban land-use efficiency (LUE) through the relationship between land consumption rate (LCR) and population growth rate (PGR), commonly expressed as LCRPGR. However, city-level implementation produces a single value that can mask where efficient or inefficient urban development occurs. This study develops and demonstrates a spatially [...]
Two decades of kilometer-scale daily PM2.5 from satellite observations and machine learning reveal geographically diverging exposure in Ghana
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major contributor to global burden of disease, yet air quality data remain sparse in many low- and middle-income countries, limiting nationwide monitoring and effective policy development. We address this gap by developing a high-resolution gridded (1 km × 1 km) dataset for daily surface PM2.5 concentrations in Ghana from 2005 to 2025 by training [...]
Direct mapping of plantation forest aboveground biomass change with deep learning and SAR-optical fusion
Published: 2026-06-03
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation
Accurately tracking changes in forest aboveground biomass (ΔAGB) is necessary for understanding global carbon dynamics. Traditional approaches estimate ΔAGB indirectly by differencing two independent biomass predictions, compounding uncertainty and reducing accuracy. Here, we develop a Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) machine learning framework that uses multi-sensor fusion of Sentinel-1 C-band SAR, [...]
Rapid quantification of fluorescent micro- and nanoplastics (≤2 μm) in soil
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Soil Science
Micro- and nanoplastics (MNP) pose an emerging threat to soil ecosystems, with particular concern for small MNP (≤10 µm). Although small fluorescent MNP are widely used to track MNP distribution and transport in aquatic environments and organisms, analyses of small fluorescent MNP in soil remain qualitative. Here, we present the first direct quantification approach for MNP ≤2 μm in soil using [...]
Agricultural drought monitoring with Sentinel-1 Cross-Ratio in heterogeneous tropical agriculture: a Mozambique case study
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Monitoring
Agricultural drought monitoring is essential for food security in tropical regions where rain-fed agriculture predominates. Operational early warning systems rely primarily on optical vegetation indices, but cloud cover limits their usability during critical growing periods. SAR satellites can observe through clouds, yet their adoption in agricultural drought monitoring remains limited. This [...]
Deforestation Edge Effects on Soil Moisture Persistence in the Amazon Basin: Observational Evidence for Lateral Hydrological Degradation and Minimum Viable Restoration Scales
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Sciences, Hydrology
Deforestation in the Amazon basin degrades not only the cleared land but also the hydrological function of adjacent intact forest. Here we combine 10 years of SMAP Level 4 root-zone soil moisture (9 km, 2015 to 2024) with Hansen Global Forest Change data (30 m) to quantify how proximity to deforestation edges affects soil moisture persistence in intact forest across the Amazon basin. We classify [...]
GEDIMetrics: a QGIS plugin for accessing and integrating multi-product GEDI spaceborne LiDAR data
Published: 2026-05-18
Subjects: Databases and Information Systems, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Management, Geographic Information Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) provides near-global, high-resolution 3D LiDAR observations of forest vertical structure. However, GEDI products are distributed as independent HDF5 files organised by beam, requiring ad-hoc workflows for data discovery, quality filtering, spatial subsetting, and footprint-level alignment across products. Existing tools either target a single [...]
CryoSentinel: A Multimodal Foundation-Model Segmenter for Glacial Lakes in High Mountain Asia from Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 Optical, and Copernicus DEM Imagery
Published: 2026-05-16
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology
Glacial-lake outburst floods (GLOFs) are the dominant climate-driven hazard in High Mountain Asia, and reliable lake-extent segmentation is the prerequisite for every downstream early-warning workflow. We present CryoSentinel, a multimodal foundation-model semantic segmenter built on the IBM/ESA TerraMind 1.0 Large encoder (1.1 B parameters) with a UperNet decoder, fine-tuned on 5,614 [...]
Calibrated spatial uncertainty for Earth observation foundation models via Matérn-motivated latent stochastic regularization
Published: 2026-05-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
Earth observation foundation models produce dense spatial embeddings that support transfer learning across sensors and regions, yet these representations carry no explicit spatial statistical model for covariance, smoothness, or uncertainty. Existing deep learning uncertainty methods produce per-pixel variance estimates that ignore spatial dependence, and their calibration is rarely assessed [...]
A Blueprint for Integrated Climate Intelligence
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Planetary Sciences, Sustainability
Climate information is advancing faster than the decision systems designed to use it. Emergency response operates on timescales of hours, whereas societal adaptation unfolds over decades. Yet climate science, impact assessment and policy remain poorly integrated, limiting coherent action across timescales. We argue that artificial intelligence should be developed not only as a domain-specific [...]
Spatiotemporal Evolution of Urban Thermal Conditions, Vegetation Dynamics, and Built-up Expansion in Ahmedabad, India (2000–2025) Using Multi-Temporal Landsat Analysis.
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Rapid urban expansion has substantially altered urban thermal conditions across many semi-arid cities. This study examined spatiotemporal variation in land surface temperature (LST), vegetation cover, and built-up intensity across Ahmedabad, India, between 2000 and 2025 using multi-temporal Landsat imagery and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. Spatial analysis revealed progressive expansion [...]
Wet and Dry Hydrological Conditions Reduce Chlorophyll-a at River-Lake Interfaces
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Fresh Water Studies, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Water Resource Management
Hydrological variation is intensifying under climate change, yet its net effects on lake water quality remain uncertain. Wet and dry hydrological conditions are commonly assumed to exacerbate eutrophication by increasing nutrient inputs during wet conditions or concentrating nutrients during dry conditions. However, these events can also activate counteracting processes—such as dilution, or [...]