Preprints
There are 7018 Preprints listed.
Development and Evaluation of the High-Resolution MUSICA UK Domain: A Case Study of Global and Regional Biomass Burning Impacts
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Regional air quality models provide insights into local pollution and exposure, but limitations in representing large-scale atmospheric processes and long-range transport can introduce inconsistencies across spatial scales, which can be addressed using multi-scale chemical transport models. We develop the first UK-specific regionally refined grid (UKne30×16; ∼7 km), alongside a global uniform [...]
The Largest Mountain Belt of the Last Billion Years: The East African Orogen, its tectono-topographic evolution and global significance.
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Hutton’s Principle of Uniformitarianism suggests that the present is the key to the past, and in the present, Earth’s topography is dominated by the Himalaya. The geological record clearly preserves past mountain ranges, but few have purported to have the effect on Earth’s surface systems (such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and ocean chemistry) that the Himalaya does today. The [...]
Local heat islands and vegetation losses are microclimatic consequences of global data centers
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The explosion in cloud computing and artificial intelligence has driven a rapid expansion of data centers. While the immense energy and water consumption of these facilities is well-documented, their impacts on local microclimates remain largely unexplored. Here, using satellite-derived estimates of land surface temperature and surface greenness, we isolate the microclimate footprint of almost [...]
Downstream patterns in bedrock valley morphology encode climatic and tectonic forcing
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
Fluvially-carved bedrock valleys are ubiquitous landscape features. Vertical incision into underlying bedrock generates valley relief, whereas lateral migration of the river channel widens the valley floor as the river erodes the valley walls. The relative efficacy of these processes, which can be modulated by precipitation and water discharge, sediment supply, lithology, and uplift rates is [...]
Public Understanding of the Atmospheric River Scale
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are long, narrow bands of moisture in the atmosphere that transport large amounts of water vapor, producing hazards ranging from heavy rain to high winds once they reach land. In 2019, researchers at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, with partners including the National Weather Service and the California Department of Water Resources, developed the AR [...]
Rapid quantification of fluorescent micro- and nanoplastics (≤2 μm) in soil
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Soil Science
Micro- and nanoplastics (MNP) pose an emerging threat to soil ecosystems, with particular concern for small MNP (≤10 µm). Although small fluorescent MNP are widely used to track MNP distribution and transport in aquatic environments and organisms, analyses of small fluorescent MNP in soil remain qualitative. Here, we present the first direct quantification approach for MNP ≤2 μm in soil using [...]
Forecasting Lives Lost to Climate Change
Published: 2026-05-26
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This review synthesises empirical evidence linking global mean surface temperature to climate mortality through undernourishment, heat, extreme events, conflict, and disease, and introduces an exploratory precautionary metric: cumulative climate-related deaths per cumulative megatonne of greenhouse gas emissions (CO₂-e), intended to support policy evaluation under deep uncertainty. Using observed [...]
AI–Based Classification of Coffee Leaf Rust from Leaf Images in Smallholder Kenyan Farms
Published: 2026-05-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coffee leaf rust (CLR), caused by Hemileia vastatrix, remains a major threat to smallholder coffee production, yet access to timely and actionable disease risk information is limited. This study developed and compared machine learning models for predicting CLR incidence using plot-level data from 9,850 observations collected across six Arabica-producing counties in Kenya between 2018 and 2023. [...]
Post-glacial sedimentary evolution and stratigraphy of the shallow offshore areas of the Shetland Islands (UK)
Published: 2026-05-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
We present a high-resolution seismic–sedimentological reconstruction of post-glacial sedimentation in three shallow offshore basins around the Shetland Islands (Dury Voe, Colgrave Sound/Basta Voe, and Yell Sound), based on integrated multibeam bathymetry, sub-bottom profiler data, and 77 vibrocores supported by radiocarbon dating. Sediment distribution is strongly controlled by inherited bedrock [...]
Productive Rather Than Aesthetic Urban Landscapes Drive Actualized Sustainable Consumption
Published: 2026-05-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations
Global sustainability initiatives prioritize urban greenery to foster resilient cities, yet their efficacy remains under-researched in the Global South. Conventional reliance on self-reported data risks a pervasive “green illusion”— a discrepancy between reported behavior and actual sustainable consumption behavior. To diagnose this anomaly, we synthesize spatial morphology and psychometric [...]
Marine Heatwaves Disrupt Phytoplankton Communities Through Trait-dependent Selection
Published: 2026-05-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Marine Biology
Phytoplankton communities, key regulators of marine ecosystems and the global carbon cycle, are susceptible to sea surface temperature variability, such as marine heatwaves (MHWs). However, their trait-dependent responses and the resulting compositional shifts during MHWs remain poorly understood. Here, using an advanced global ocean–biogeochemical model that resolves 310 phytoplankton trait [...]
Agricultural drought monitoring with Sentinel-1 Cross-Ratio in heterogeneous tropical agriculture: a Mozambique case study
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Monitoring
Agricultural drought monitoring is essential for food security in tropical regions where rain-fed agriculture predominates. Operational early warning systems rely primarily on optical vegetation indices, but cloud cover limits their usability during critical growing periods. SAR satellites can observe through clouds, yet their adoption in agricultural drought monitoring remains limited. This [...]
Hydroelectric Regulation Decouples Arctic Silica Delivery from the Diatom Bloom: A Climate-Independent Causal Attribution Across Twenty Subarctic Rivers
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Large subarctic rivers deliver most of their dissolved nutrients during the spring freshet, in approximate phase with the ice-edge diatom bloom that those nutrients support. Hydroelectric regulation flattens the river hydrograph, holding back the freshet and raising winter discharge, and in doing so it redistributes nutrient delivery in time. Across twenty subarctic rivers spanning the Arctic [...]
Emerging links between Greenland ice melt, Euro-Mediterranean heat extremes, and destructive convective storms
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Greenland ice loss is accelerating, but its consequences beyond sea-level rise remain poorly understood. At the same time, the Euro-Mediterranean region is facing unprecedented summer climate extremes where the underlying mechanisms have been long debated. Here we present the first evidence of a far-reaching cascading mechanism by which Greenland ice sheet melting acts as a major forcing of [...]
Wildfire smoke offsets decades of progress in reducing ozone exposure across the United States
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences
Ground-level ozone (O3) pollution has declined in the U.S., yet the progress has stalled in recent years, coinciding with increasing wildfire smoke. Using ensemble machine learning models trained on surface observations, we develop a gridded daily smoke O3 dataset across the contiguous U.S. from 2006-2023. We estimate that wildfire smoke placed an additional 29 million people each year in areas [...]