Preprints
There are 7760 Preprints listed.
Evaluating Bank Restoration and Stabilization in the Yellow River in Northern Indiana: Mitigation of Sediment and Nutrient Transport
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission, evaluated the effects of streambank remediation on the Yellow River in northwest Indiana. Two phases of remediation were completed on the Yellow River between 2021 and 2023, after assessments indicated it was a large contributor of sediment to the Kankakee River. Temporal [...]
Novel Mechanism of Abiotic Ammonium Oxidation Triggers Nitrous Oxide Bursts Upon Soil Rewetting
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Drought-rewetting cycles (DWC) in soil are accompanied by a rapid burst of nitrous oxide (N2O) emission within minutes without reactivation of dormant microbes. Here we present a manifold of evidence for a previously unrecognized abiotic mechanism connecting soil ammonium (NH4+) to N2O with hydroxylamine (NH2OH) as a key intermediate. DWC experiments in the Negev Desert soil revealed comparable [...]
Orientations to navigate the complexity of freshwater resilience in social-ecological systems
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Hydrology, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Resilience is a widely applied and diversely interpreted concept in freshwater science with applications that span disciplines, analytical frameworks, scales of analysis, and system delineations. This diversity leads to an equally rich variety of resilience insights which are difficult to compare, aggregate, synthesize, and apply in decision-relevant contexts. Here, we seek to support greater [...]
Rapid satellite assessment of the 2026 High Fens fire
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Climate change is altering fire regimes across Europe, contributing to longer periods of favorable fire weather. In August 2026, the High Fens nature reserve experienced one of the largest wildfires in Belgium's recorded history. This event is ecologically and biogeochemically significant because the fire affected a landscape dominated by carbon-dense peatlands, where prolonged smouldering can [...]
The relation of ENSO with global surface temperature
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Here we examined the seasonal structure of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)–global surface temperature relation in monthly observations for June 1979–May 2026. Neglecting seasonality, correlations of Niño-3.4 with global mean surface temperature (GMST) and tropical mean surface temperature (TMST) are largest at lags of three and two months, respectively; without detrending, GMST [...]
Understanding Earthquake Physics with On-Fault Observatories
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Earthquakes often strike without warning. Current fault monitoring infrastructure is not sensitive enough to detect signals such as accelerating fault creep or dilation, which laboratory experiments and numerical models predict may precede large earthquakes. Here we argue that a paradigm shift is needed and technically achievable: from inferring faulting processes from a distance with surface [...]
Does low-carbon transition encourage equity principles ?
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
This study investigates researchers’ research practices using the Ma Terre (MTr) serious game, in which participants adopt fictional, but realistic, characters representing research team members. Across eighty five Ma Terre workshops gathering three hundred academics issued from twelve research domains, teams negotiated measures to reduce their carbon footprint by 50%, considering travel research [...]
No Robust Evidence for a GDP–Methane Relationship in Africa, 1970–2024: A Multi-Specification Test Against the Environmental Kuznets Curve and STIRPAT Frameworks
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The green growth hypothesis, that economic growth can be decoupled from environmental harm, is embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals and national climate strategies, yet remains contested, with recent evidence questioning whether decoupling occurs fast enough to meet climate targets. Methane policy for Africa, including the Global Methane Pledge's 22-plus African signatories, implicitly [...]
Preserving Probabilistic Meaning in Weather-to-Text Generation
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology
Weather-to-text generation must preserve the event attached to a probability, not only its numerical value. We represent rainfall statements through event thresholds, boundary inclusion, probability levels and conditioning. A verifier bounds event probabilities under partially specified exact distributions and separately checks fidelity to operational reporting conventions. We evaluate eight [...]
Assessment of adjacency effect correction methods for Sentinel-2 MSI observations over mid-latitude lakes
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate retrieval of remote-sensing reflectance (Rrs) from lakes requires separating water-leaving radiance from atmospheric, surface and adjacency contributions. We assessed adjacency effect correction (AEC) methods for Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) imagery using 329 satellite--insitu matchups from four mid-latitude lakes: Greifensee, Lake Geneva, Lake Garda and Lake Trasimeno. The [...]
GeoAgent: An Agent-Based QGIS Plugin for Natural-Language-Driven Geospatial Analysis with Multi-Backend Large Language Model Support
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Geographic Information Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Spatial Science
Geospatial analysis is essential across the earth and environmental sciences, yet conventional geographic information systems (GIS) rely on a procedure-oriented paradigm that demands substantial operational expertise. We present GeoAgent, an open-source QGIS plugin that enables goal-driven geospatial workflows through natural language conversation powered by large language models (LLMs). GeoAgent [...]
MUSE: virtual tide gauge reference estimates and error budgets for coastal index validation at ungauged coastlines
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography
Multi-dimensional coastal indices such as mangrove health indices aggregate tidal-range, mean higher-high water (MHHW), and tidal-anomaly sub-scores. Validating these sub-scores requires in situ tide gauges that low-data coastlines lack within 100 km. Global tide models such as EOT20 give accurate coastal tidal constituents but no tidal-anomaly metrics or per-source error terms for a [...]
On the pattern, magnitude, and timing of anthropogenic heat uptake in the Southern Ocean
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Most of the anthropogenic heat absorbed by the ocean enters through the Southern Ocean, yet the processes that set the pattern, magnitude, and timing of this uptake remain unclear. Using a climate model (CESM1) under abrupt 4xCO2, we show that uptake by the preindustrial ocean circulation alone accounts for more than half of the Southern Ocean uptake and reproduces its slow decline. We isolate [...]
Training-Free Monitoring of Kenya with Pre-computed Satellite Embeddings: Lake Expansion, Construction Dating and Crop Retrieval with TESSERA
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pre-computed embeddings from geospatial foundation models turn the most expensive step of satellite analysis into shared data. We test how much analysis this enables for one country, using TESSERA, which publishes a 128-dimensional embedding for every 10 m pixel and year. An audit of Kenya shows that all 4,766 tiles centred in the country carry all nine years (2017–2025), but that the landmask [...]
Multi-site evaluation of an improved SIF-based model for estimating canopy GPP
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences
Sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) offers a promising path to quantify gross primary productivity (GPP) across spatiotemporal scales. Recent studies have demonstrated the applicability of the SIF-based mechanistic light response (qMLR-SIF) model for estimating canopy GPP. However, the inadequate simulation of the key parameter qL (the fraction of open photosystem II reaction centers) [...]