Preprints
There are 7014 Preprints listed.
Public Understanding of the Atmospheric River Scale
Published: 2026-05-26
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: 2026-05-26
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 [...]
Trapped Lee-Wave Resonance Determines Antarctic Megadune Wavelength
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Categorical Data Analysis, Design of Experiments and Sample Surveys, Earth Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Mineral Physics, Other Earth Sciences, Paleontology, Physics, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Planetary Glaciology, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Mineral Physics, Planetary Sciences, Planetary Sedimentology, Sedimentology, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Stratigraphy
Snow megadunes cover 5×105 km2 of the East Antarctic plateau, biasing surface mass balance estimates and overprinting ice-core signals—yet their 2–5 km wavelength has lacked a quantitative selection mechanism for two decades. We first falsify the standard formula λ∗ = 2πU0/N through a calibration-free spatial test: eight REMA 2 m tiles across two independent locations at 81.5–82.0°S show no [...]
High Awareness, Limited Action: Explaining Attitudinal Barriers to Climate Mitigation in Academia
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Higher Education
General support for climate action is widely expressed within academia and public research, with surveys consistently reporting exceptionally high levels of awareness and concern about the climate crisis. Yet, the implementation of mitigation policies in universities and research institutions remains limited. Drawing on a national survey of 4,688 academics and research personnel in France, we [...]
When Fiction Reflects Fiction: Contrarian Views of Climate Change in Popular Entertainment TV & Films
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate contrarian discourse permeates a wide range of media outlets, including popular entertainment television shows and films. This study identifies and quantifies the frequency of these views within a large global corpus of entertainment scripts derived from film and television subtitles (N = 223,782). Additionally, drawing on a discourse studies perspective, we evaluate the performance of a [...]
Bridging social–ecological systems and ecological economics to navigate polycrisis
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human societies and ecological systems experience interacting and compounding crises, a condition often described as ‘polycrisis’. To better navigate it, we propose a synthesis agenda at the interface of ecological economics (EE) and social–ecological systems (SES) research. Through collaborative synthesis and building on a practical framework of crisis dynamics as shocks and creeping changes, we [...]