Preprints
There are 7585 Preprints listed.
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 north face 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; that assertion has not been substantiated in published analysis. Using [...]
Station spacing bounds the recovery of rainfall extremes by interpolation: an independent-network test with consequences for landslide thresholds
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Gridded rainfall products interpolated from gauge networks underpin landslide early warning, and a common view holds that their main deficiency in mountains is the omission of orographic enhancement. This study tests that view using an independent network: 464 mountain stations operated by the Korea Forest Service that do not enter the operational grid of the Korea Meteorological Administration. [...]
AxiSEM3D: efficient 3D wave propagation across scales and worlds
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology
We present a new, unified release of the AxiSEM3D seismic modelling code, which is able to rapidly and efficiently compute synthetic seismograms for the Earth and many other worlds. Over the past decade, separate and incompatible versions of AxiSEM3D's main branch have been developed and individually benchmarked, including new capabilities such as the inclusion of fluid oceans and atmospheres, [...]
A Unified Forearc Subsidence Model Based on the Three-Arc Unjoined Structure of the Honshu Arc
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study reinterprets the subsidence, uplift, fault activity, and geomorphic development observed in the Nōbi Plain, Ise Bay, Lake Biwa, Wakasa Bay, and Osaka Bay through a new structural framework in which the Honshu Arc is understood as an incompletely joined system of three arcs. The Southwest Japan Arc (narrow sense), the Hida–Tamba Terrane, and the Northeast Japan Arc approached each other [...]
Agentic Large Language Model Workflows for Earth Observation: Tool Orchestration, Foundation-Model Adaptation, and the Evaluation Gap
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Engineering
Large language model (LLM) agents have moved rapidly from general-purpose assistants to domain systems that orchestrate specialised remote-sensing models. Within roughly two years, geospatial agents have demonstrated reliable task planning across dozens of Earth Observation (EO) tasks, benchmark environments containing hundreds of tools, and fine-tuned open-weight controllers that outperform far [...]
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
Deglacial Mass-Movement Floods as a Potential Source of Catastrophic Flood Traditions: A Testable Geomythological Hypothesis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology
Catastrophic flood traditions occur in many geographically separated cultures, but their possible geological substrates need not be uniform. Existing explanations include river floods, earthquake and volcanic tsunamis, glacial-lake outburst floods, postglacial sea-level rise, and cultural transmission. This paper proposes a complementary, explicitly testable hypothesis: during the terminal [...]
Methodological Bias between Trajectory Geometric Co-location and Air-Parcel Lagrangian Co-location: Evidence from UAV Re-penetration Observations over the Western Sichuan Plateau
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology
Whether "trajectory geometric co-location" is equivalent to "air-parcel Lagrangian co-location" remains a methodological blind spot in evaluating UAV cloud-seeding re-penetration (the UAV performed a repeated cloud penetration—hereafter, re-penetration—to re-sample the same cloud volume). Using silver iodide (AgI) seeding observations from a Wing Loong-2 UAV flight over the Western Sichuan [...]