Preprints
There are 7735 Preprints listed.
Vulnerability to flood-sensitive environmentally persistent zoonoses: a scoping review
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Public Health
Background Environmentally persistent zoonoses (EPZs), such as leptospirosis and melioidosis, are caused by pathogens that can survive outside of a host for over 48 hours. Their transmission is sensitive to climate hazards such as flooding, which can disperse pathogens and increase opportunities for spillover. Risk of exposure to EPZs during flooding is influenced by the vulnerability of exposed [...]
Seasonal water-source transitions across livelihood systems in Somalia: Spatial heterogeneity and household correlates
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Geography
Water access in dryland settings is commonly represented by a single primary drinking-water source, although households may reorganize their water supply as rainfall, source availability, mobility, and market access change between seasons. This study examines rainy-to-dry water-source transitions across livelihood systems in Somalia using the nationally representative 2022 Somalia Integrated [...]
Fit for purpose evapotranspiration measurements: A multi-site comparison of lower-cost approaches across croplands and shrublands
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Evapotranspiration (ET) links the water and energy cycles, yet research-grade eddy covariance (EC) systems may not be the best option to deploy operationally for water management. Emerging lower-cost ET approaches may expand fit-for-purpose observations, but their reliability across contrasting ecosystems, climates, and instrumentation configurations remains uncertain. Here, we evaluate [...]
Fractures and Floods: Small-scale spatial and temporal processes driving change in a relic ice-shelf basal channel
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Glaciology
Basal channels, which form beneath ice shelves due to localized warm or fast-moving water, may weaken ice shelves by localizing deformation that promotes crevasse formation. Here, we test this hypothesis and investigate the role of fracturing and melt generation in the evolution of an ice shelf basal channel. We use ground-based ice-penetrating radar imaging of change over 3 years for the [...]
Forecasting the moisture content of live forest fuels with a transformer machine learning model and Sentinel-2 satellite data
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) provides an indicator of vegetation flammability, the potential for canopy dieback from drought, and habitat quality for arboreal fauna. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have increased the potential in meteorological forecasts for Earth surface forecasting. Combining weather forecasts with remotely sensed LFMC offers a promising avenue for short and [...]
Model-Based Assessment of Geogenic Radon Exposure in Chaco Canyon and Adjacent Ancestral Puebloan Residential Settings
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Geochemistry, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Paleontology, Sustainability
Naturally occurring radon-222 and its short-lived alpha-emitting progeny are important sources of environmental radioactivity in enclosed, earth-contact spaces, yet their potential relevance to archaeological built environments has rarely been quantified. Here we evaluate chronic radon exposure in Chaco Canyon, where Ancestral Pueblo people occupied earth-contact and semi-subterranean rooms [...]
Unlocking Historical Sea Level Records through Digitisation—A Review and Inventory
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Multi-decadal to centennial sea-level time series are essential for quantifying historic trends in mean and extreme sea levels, refining future projections, calibrating coastal models, and supporting coastal management and adaptation strategies. Data archaeology can increase the spatial coverage and length of timeseries through the recovery of historical observations from paper-based records. [...]
BEYOND PREDICTION: A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR ADVANCED AI IN AFRICAN SOIL INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Dynamical Systems, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Soil Science, Sustainability
Digital soil mapping has produced the first continent-wide baseline estimates of soil properties in Africa, yet existing soil information systems remain fragmented, poorly standardized, and largely confined to static offline spatial prediction. Their ability to capture near-real-time soil conditions or provide timely, field-level decision support is therefore limited. This paper argues that the [...]
Propagation of the Storegga tsunami in the southeastern North Sea
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Numerical simulations of the 8150 BP Storegga slide event in the Norwegian Sea are necessary for understanding both landslide dynamics and tsunami propagation. Here we focus on the southern North Sea, South East of Dogger Bank, and the shores of Denmark and Germany where there have been reports of Storegga tsunami deposits. We simulate the slide using a recently developed cohesive landslide model [...]
Evaluating Cross-Country Generalization of Deep Learning-Based Flood Mapping Using Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 Imagery
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Other Computer Sciences
Benchmark performance in flood mapping does not reliably predict how a model will behave in a new country. This paper tests that directly. Using the Sen1Floods11 dataset, we evaluate twelve model configurations—two architectures (Vanilla U-Net and ResNet34-encoder U-Net) across three sensing modalities (Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 augmented with NDWI and MNDWI spectral indices, and multimodal [...]
The June 2026 Socorro swarm: A reactivation of rift-parallel normal faults above the Socorro Magma Body
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
In June 2026 an earthquake swarm of maximum local magnitude (ML) 3.9, comprising 425 matched-filter detections, occurred in the central Rio Grande rift about 45 km north of Socorro, New Mexico, above the northern margin of the Socorro Magma Body (SMB). This setting makes a magmatic or fluid origin the natural hypothesis. We test this hypothesis against the source physics, comparing the swarm with [...]
Evaluating Modern Tools and Large Language Models for Digitising Sea-Level Data from Marigrams
Published: 2026-09-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Numerous graphical data digitisation tools exist; however, few have been applied to the recovery of historical sea-level marigrams (tidal charts). Using an early twentieth-century marigram from the Clyde Estuary, Scotland, containing one week of sea level observations, we evaluated the performance of 11 digitisation tools and 2 large language models (LLMs) in digitising marigrams. A multi-user [...]
Where do slopes fail in Rudraprayag? A small-inventory landslide susceptibility study, and how evaluation choices change the answer
Published: 2026-09-27
Subjects: Education
Rudraprayag district in the Garhwal Himalaya (Uttarakhand, India) is highly landslide-prone and lies on the pilgrimage route to Kedarnath. No landslide inventory was accessible for this study, so I built a preliminary one semi-automatically: bare, steep patches detected in Sentinel-2 imagery were verified one by one on high-resolution imagery, giving 38 landslides. I trained random forests on [...]
Climate Sensitivity from 21st-Century Trends in Earth's Energy Imbalance
Published: 2026-09-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Earth's energy imbalance has increased rapidly since continuous satellite observations began in 2001, raising concern that equilibrium climate sensitivity may be higher than in recent assessments. Here we use energy-budget trends over 2006–2024 to estimate climate sensitivity in a Bayesian framework, accounting for uncertainty in observations, forcing, variability, and pattern effects. Climate [...]
Physics, Ecology, Mathematics and Engineering of the Negawatt Economy: A Formal Architecture for Verified Energy Conservation
Published: 2026-09-26
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The contribution is a formal issuance architecture for verified energy conservation. The Negawatt (NWT) is the registry denomination of that conservation: one NWT equals one megawatt-hour (1 MWh) accepted under Proof of Conservation. In this paper, energy conservation means measured and verified avoided energy use relative to an adjusted baseline; it does not mean the First-Law [...]