Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
Flooded Rivers, Drying Wetlands, Vanishing Tributaries: Hydrological Paradox of the East Ganga Plains
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The East Ganga Plains (EGP) present a striking hydrological paradox: while embanked rivers flood with increasing magnitude, adjacent wetlands and groundwater-fed streams are desiccating, and aquifer storage is declining. Using satellite remote sensing and gravimetry, we document that: (i) wetlands exhibit significant water-cover loss despite stable monsoon rainfall; (ii) small rivers and [...]
PyRiverShift: A Gaussian Transect Decomposition Framework for Quantifying Sub-Pixel Lateral Channel Mobility
Published: 2026-08-17
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Along many rivers, lateral channel mobility is a key process, yet quantification from freely available multi-decadal 30 m Landsat imagery is constrained by low pixel resolution relative to channel width. We introduce PyRiverShift, a sensor-agnostic spectral decomposition framework. PyRiverShift fits a 1-D Gaussian to NDWI profiles along valley-perpendicular transects, recovering sub-pixel channel [...]
Source-composition sensitivity in historical marine wind observations: a CLIWOC case study, 1750--1855
Published: 2026-08-16
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 [...]
Methane emissions intensity mapping from space reveals outsized emissions impact from marginal oil and gas production in the U.S.
Published: 2026-08-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane emissions reduction from the oil/gas sector, the largest industrial methane source, is a widely-recognized effective strategy for slowing the rate of climate warming. There are over 600,000 well-pads in the U.S.; one-fifth produce most of the economic value, while the remainder produce limited oil/gas. We use high-resolution MethaneSAT satellite data covering >80% of US onshore [...]
Hydroclimatic Regime Shifts and Compound Heat–Dry Events in Rajshahi Division, Bangladesh: Integrating Thermal Gradients, Change-Point Detection, and Heat-Driven Dryness Dynamics (1992–2022)
Published: 2026-08-08
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Statistical Models
Hydroclimatic variability and compound climate extremes are increasingly affecting monsoon-dominated regions of South Asia, particularly drought-prone northwestern Bangladesh. However, integrated assessments of thermal dynamics, atmospheric moisture, land–atmosphere coupling, and compound heat–dry events remain limited in the regional context. Therefore, this study investigated long-term [...]
Climatic distance to cultivar origin predicts Deglet Noor date quality across two continents
Published: 2026-08-07
Subjects: Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Climate, Desert Ecology, Environmental Monitoring
Background. Premium-grade cultivars of terroir-controlled crops are tied to specific climatic origins, yet the quantitative relationships linking climate, soil and quality remain poorly resolved across whole production landscapes. Deglet Noor date palm — the historically dominant premium cultivar of North African oases, named for the optical translucency of its top-grade fruits — exemplifies this [...]
Twin indicators of coastal vulnerability: land subsidence and mangrove extent change in Dili, Timor-Leste
Published: 2026-08-07
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Natural Resources and Conservation
Mangrove forests and land subsidence are major drivers of coastal vulnerability rarely quantified together outside the well-studied deltas of Southeast Asia. This study provides the first satellite-based, twin-indicator assessment of coastal vulnerability for Dili, Timor-Leste, combining Sentinel-1 InSAR time series analysis of land subsidence with Global Mangrove Watch extent change over a [...]
Plume Origin Localisation with Computer Vision
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Satellite remote sensing has become a critical tool for monitoring, measuring, and mitigating methane emissions globally. Reliable attribution of methane plumes to their source facility is needed to enable emission mitigation action, robust emissions accounting, and regulatory oversight. Although experts can manually attribute plumes to individual facilities, automated approaches are required for [...]
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 [...]
Global Flood Mapper v2: Open-Access Flood Mapping and Exposure Assessment with Sentinel-1 SAR
Published: 2026-07-31
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology
We present Global Flood Mapper v2 (GFM v2), which adds flood depth estimation, on-demand GeoTIFF export, cloud-based impact assessment against high-resolution land cover and five global population datasets to quantify exposure uncertainty, and parameter-encoded URLs for reproducibility and sharing. Its predecessor, GFM v1, was already an open-access, globally operational web portal for rapid, [...]
SCI-VIS: Lightweight Visibility Tagging for Coastal Camera Monitoring
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Automated assessment of imaging conditions is a necessary pre-processing step for any computer vision pipeline deployed on outdoor cameras subject to atmospheric variability. We describe SCI-VIS, a lightweight per-frame visibility classifier deployed within the Surfline Coastal Intelligence (SCI) pipeline. The Surfline coastal-camera network spans ~1,200 cameras worldwide. SCI-VIS tags each [...]
Detecting illegal water abstractions using Earth Observation and artificial intelligence: challenges, research gaps, and future directions
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Water scarcity and unsustainable withdrawals are major environmental challenges, particularly in semi-arid and Mediterranean regions where agriculture places strong pressure on limited hydrological resources. Illegal or unreported water abstractions intensify these pressures by undermining ecosystem stability, policy compliance, and long-term water security. Although Earth Observation (EO) and [...]
SCI-OBS: Detection and Classification of People on the Beach and in the Surf Zone
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Understanding how many people use beaches and surf zones is vital for safety, tourism, and coastal management. Traditional manual headcounts are time-consuming and inconsistent, while existing automated systems often fail in complex conditions due to glare, waves obstructing the view, and the small apparent size of distant subjects. We present SCI-OBS, an automated multi-class detector deployed [...]
Leveraging satellite embeddings and national expert annotations for country-level forest land use mapping
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy
Spatially explicit information on forest as a land use can support climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation actions, as well as supply-chain regulations, but many countries lack recent forest maps consistent with international definitions. Here, we assess a simple and accessible workflow for country-level Forest/Non-Forest mapping using expert reference labels from the FAO Forest [...]
Thermal Dynamics of Peri-Urban Landscapes: A Paired Spatial Analysis of Brick Kilns and Bare Soil in León, Guanajuato
Published: 2026-07-20
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Urban expansion and industrial activities in peri-urban environments modify land cover and influence surface thermal patterns. This study examines the thermal behavior of artisanal brick kilns in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, using a paired spatial approach designed to distinguish the contribution of kiln activity from that of the surrounding landscape. Landsat 8 Collection 2 Level-2 imagery acquired [...]