Preprints
There are 7592 Preprints listed.
From Heat Summation to Climate Adaptation: Lessons from 75 Years of the Winkler Index for Agroclimatic Metric Design
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Agroclimatic indices are foundational tools for matching crop cultivars to suitable climates, yet the accelerating pace of climate change is exposing the limits of indices built on mean conditions. The Winkler Index (WI) is a regional categorization system based on heat summation informed by wines made from grapes throughout California in the 1940s to 1960s, and it remains one of the most widely [...]
How much of a machine-learning earthquake catalogue can an expert verify?
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Machine-learning systems are becoming the instruments that generate the primary data of a scientific field, and what such a system asserts is not the same as what an expert would endorse. Earthquake detection is one of the few settings where the difference can be measured, because a detection can be checked blind against the waveforms that produced it. Four seismologists returned 4,800 blind [...]
Terrain-Dependent Generalization Failure in Multimodal Lunar Crater Classification: A Comparative Study Using Optical and Topographic Data
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Sciences
Automated lunar crater detection is an important task in planetary mapping, geological analysis, and future lunar exploration. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of combining optical imagery with topographic information; however, the influence of terrain variability on crater classification performance remains insufficiently explored. This study presents a comparative evaluation of [...]
Biodiversity conservation policies alter the solution space of climate mitigation scenarios
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Conserving biodiversity while mitigating climate change is one of the defining sustainability challenges of this century. Paris-aligned mitigation pathways rely heavily on forest restoration and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). While forest restoration can simultaneously enhance wildlife habitat and increase carbon sequestration, large-scale biomass production for BECCS may [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
Beyond climate-change risk: subjective attribution, multidimensional impact appraisal, and adaptation advocacy among Swedish forestry professionals
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adaptation may depend on whether decision-makers recognise climate change, but also on whether they attribute experienced changes to climate change and how they appraise consequences across valued domains. We analysed survey data from 140 Swedish forestry professionals to examine whether stronger subjective attribution of experienced forest changes to climate change is associated with more [...]
Causal Analysis of Key Factors Enhancing Drought Resilience through Water Management: A Hybrid Content Analysis, Fuzzy Delphi, and DEMATEL Approach
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering
This study aims to identify and analyze the key factors affecting drought resilience through water management and to examine the causal relationships among them. A mixed-methods sequential design was applied. First, a meta-synthesis and content analysis of studies published between 2005 and 2025 identified the main resilience factors. Then, the fuzzy Delphi method validated these factors through [...]
Lab-based X-ray imaging for accurate seismic velocity measurements at high pressure
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Mineral Physics
A novel approach for accurately measuring the compressional (P) and shear-wave (S) velocities of materials at high pressure is demonstrated up to ~6 GPa using a Paris-Edinburgh press. Typically, accurate ultrasonic velocity measurements at high pressure require synchrotron facilities to image the sample length in-situ and to determine the internal cell pressure using X-ray diffraction from an [...]
Cloud Cover and Structural Observation Gaps in African Agricultural Earth Observation: Evidence from Six Agroecological Zones
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth observation underpins a growing number of agricultural-monitoring and agri-fintech services across Africa, all of which need a usable view of a field often enough to track its condition. Cloud gaps in that record are usually treated as random missing data; we test whether they are instead structurally biased. Using three growing seasons (2022–2024) of Sentinel-2 scene-classification [...]
Dendrochronology and the date of the Thera volcanic eruption
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Volcanology
The main disciplines that contribute to our understanding of the chronology of the ancient Near East are history, archaeology, and various scientific dating techniques including dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, and ice-core analysis. Beginning in the 1980s, a major rift began to develop between the historical-archaeological chronology and that based on dendrochronology-calibrated radiocarbon [...]
Recent armed conflict disrupts atmospheric climate monitoring
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The unprecedented use of GPS jamming in the Russo-Ukrainian war severely disrupts GNSS Radio Occultation, a key remote sensing technique for climate monitoring and weather forecasting. Since 2018, a growing systematic gap in atmospheric observations has extended far beyond the direct conflict zone. This loss of data substantially impairs atmospheric temperature monitoring, introducing observation [...]
Linear geophysical inversion with seismic image-guided kriging
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
Linear geophysical inversions, such as the mapping of surface gravity anomaly to subsurface density anomaly, are a cornerstone of geophysical practice. However, the high degree of ill-posedness of such problems makes interpretation of the resulting subsurface models challenging. I develop a methodology to combine surface potential field measurements, direct subsurface sampling through scout [...]
A rock-ice avalanche and the 2026 Bhote Koshi-Trishuli flood, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences
On 26 August 2026 a rock-ice avalanche in the Langtang Himal produced a debris flow and flood that destroyed the Rasuwagadhi-Gyirong border crossing within minutes and reached Devghat about six hours later. We reconstruct the cascade with a depth-averaged mixture-flow model constrained by the seismic origin time, a CCTV frame, gauge outages in the gorge and downstream stage records. The model [...]
A Changing North Atlantic Background Amplifies Western European Heatwaves
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Western European summer heatwaves have increased markedly since the 1990s, culminating in the record warmth of May–July 2026 since 1950. We show that this rise is closely associated with the slowly evolving North Atlantic background. We combine two leading April sea surface temperature modes, representing basin-wide warming and a tripole-like pattern, into an Atlantic Two-Mode Index (ATMI). The [...]
No detectable precursor in Sentinel-1 backscatter before the 26 August 2026 Langtang Lirung rock–ice avalanche, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
On 26 August 2026 a rock–ice avalanche on the west flank of Langtang Lirung, Nepal, initiated a debris flow and flood that ran roughly 100 km down the Lhende Khola, Bhote Koshi and Trishuli. Several contemporaneous reports asserted that satellite radar had tracked a month of accelerating slope movement before failure. This note tests that claim in the amplitude record. Using Copernicus Sentinel-1 [...]