Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Monitoring
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 [...]
Cloud-Free Imaging Probability Forecasting for Optical Earth-Observation Tasking over Yerevan, Armenia
Published: 2026-07-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth-observation satellites such as Sentinel-2 cannot see through cloud, so a tasking attempt over a cloudy target wastes a limited imaging window along with onboard power and downlink bandwidth. We study whether next-day cloud conditions over Yerevan, Armenia can be forecast accurately enough to automate the binary Go/No-Go tasking decision. Daily cloud-free fractions are derived from [...]
Improving PM2.5 Estimation from Satellite Aerosol Optical Depth Using Boundary Layer Height and Meteorological Variables
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate estimation of surface particulate matter (PM2.5) from satellite observations remains challenging because aerosol optical depth (AOD) represents column-integrated aerosol loading and is strongly influenced by meteorological conditions. This study investigates the relationship between satellite-derived AOD, meteorological variables, and surface PM2.5 concentrations over Mumbai, India, [...]
Erosion of Natural Cooling Infrastructure in Southeast Asian Cities: Comparative Land Surface Temperature Effects of Wetland and Paddy Loss in Phnom Penh and Can Tho
Published: 2026-07-15
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Monitoring
Rapid urbanisation across Southeast Asia is displacing two natural cooling resources: urban water bodies and peri-urban paddy fields. The biophysical relationship between land cover and land surface temperature (LST) is established at regional and continental scales, but conversion-attributable, satellite-derived quantification of wetland and paddy loss at city scale, compared directly within a [...]
Multi-scale measurements and temporally resolved modeling of methane emissions at natural gas distribution stations
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH4) emissions from natural gas distribution stations are not well characterized by measurements, contributing to uncertainty in urban emissions inventories and mitigation strategies. We conducted a multi-scale, multi-temporal study of four distribution stations in Calgary, Alberta, combining component- and facility-level measurements with modeling to quantify, attribute, and compare [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]