Preprints
There are 7810 Preprints listed.
Probabilistic Streamflow Forecasts for Mississippi River Navigation Risk and Parametric Insurance
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Mississippi River navigation is disrupted by both low and high water extremes, yet shippers, ports, and terminals lack a simple instrument to transfer that risk. We test whether probabilistic forecasts of monthly streamflow can provide useful navigation-risk information. Using pretrained Chronos-2 at three major Mississippi River subbasin outlets, we compute navigation risk probabilities, [...]
Wave-Driven Sliding, Ratcheting, and Overturning of Coral Transplant Units: An Idealized Nonsmooth Contact Model
Published: 2026-10-11
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography, Systems Biology
Coral transplantation attaches fragments to a structure placed on the seabed, and that structure must stay put long enough for the fragments to fuse to it. We examine that requirement with an idealized model in which a transplant unit is a planar rigid body on a rigid bed under two unilateral frictional contacts, loaded through a Morison description of near-bed wave kinematics and integrated by a [...]
Quantifying volumetric erosion from symbolic expression of landslide morphology
Published: 2026-10-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Landslide volumetric erosion is fundamental to regional sediment budgets and downstream hazard assessment, yet accurately constraining material mobilization remains a primary bottleneck in Earth-system research. Legacy area–volume relations introduce substantial uncertainty when applied across heterogeneous landslide populations. Here, we examine whether the erosional and accumulation (i.e., [...]
ORBIT: A new, reduced-complexity air quality model for South Asia
Published: 2026-10-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences
Exposure to outdoor air pollution is the most important environmental health risk worldwide, associated with over a million deaths each year in South Asia alone. To understand how to improve air quality, it is necessary to model how changes in emissions affect changes in pollutant concentrations and human health. However, air quality modeling typically demands substantial computation and [...]
A thermodynamically consistent theory of multicomponent porous media: finite-deformation mechanics, compositional flow, electrostatics, reactions, and phase transformations
Published: 2026-10-10
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology, Petroleum Engineering
Reactive reservoir models must combine compositional flow, deformation, electrostatics, chemical reactions, and phase transformations without losing the thermodynamic origin of each term. This paper develops such a theory for multicomponent, multiphase porous media at finite deformation. Component mass conservation is first written on phase-attached material regions and then volume averaged, [...]
Land Use Change, Spillovers, and Transitions: Global Trends, Prospects, and Emerging Drivers
Published: 2026-10-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
In this review, we first compile data on global trends and rates of major land use changes over the recent decades, and summarize the main insights revealed by these data. We then review recent research and quantitative estimates on key land use spillover processes, i.e., leakage, indirect land use change, rebound effect and land sparing, and agglomeration economies. We then turn to the [...]
Coupled in-reservoir and downstream water-temperature responses to the deep drawdown of a large reservoir, and tradeoffs for fisheries management
Published: 2026-10-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Across the Pacific Northwest and other regions, the construction and operation of large dams has provided numerous societal benefits but has also fundamentally altered present-day river networks by blocking fish passage and altering streamflows and thermal regimes. Increasingly, evolving management directives require dam operations far outside of historical operational regimes to achieve new [...]
Workflow for estimating above ground biomass from satellite imagery with non-geolocated ground validation data
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation
Satellite-based aboveground biomass mapping typically relies on validation data from field-based inventory plots or other high resolution ground truthing, but acquiring validation data is challenging. In the United States, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program is a common source of field validation data for biomass mapping, but currently the US Forest Service is not processing Material [...]
A scaling law for stagnant-lid convection with composite visco-elasto-plastic rheology: application to Europa's ice shell
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Geology, Planetary Sciences, Tectonics and Structure
Scaling laws relating the Nusselt number (Nu) and the Rayleigh number (Ra) are the standard tool for translating numerical models of convection into predictions of surface heat flux and the thicknesses of the stagnant lid and the rheological sublayer. Existing scaling frameworks for icy moons normalise this relationship using a temperature-dependence parameter, γ, calibrated against viscous and [...]
Groundwater Potential Mapping in Northwestern Nigeria: A Comparison of the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Galileo-Enhanced CAT-XGB
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Global water scarcity intensifies the need for high-resolution groundwater assessment tools, yet traditional approaches struggle to reconcile qualitative expert weights with the extensive spatial coverage offered by remote sensing data. This study presents a comparative framework evaluating expert-driven Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (a ten-layer Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)) against [...]
P- and S-Wave Travel-Time Characteristics and Station-Dependent Residuals from Local Earthquakes in Ghana
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding P- and S-wave travel-time behaviour is important for characterizing seismic-wave propagation and identifying station-dependent variability within regional seismic networks. This study investigates P- and S-wave travel-time characteristics and station-dependent residuals using local earthquakes recorded by the Ghana Digital Seismic Network (GHDSN). The analysis reexamines the [...]
The critical role of stored energy in metamorphism
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The mechanical behaviour of the Earth is widely assumed to change with increasing timescale as rocks progressively relax imposed stresses [1]. On short timescales, elasticity dominates and its release drives earthquakes [2]; at intermediate timescales, viscoelastic relaxation facilitates processes such as glacial rebound [3]; whereas over geological timescales viscous deformation dominates, [...]
Three gaps for foundation models to address in satellite remote sensing of inland waters
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Long-term Earth observation of inland waters depends on continuity between satellite missions, adequate combinations of spectral, spatial and temporal resolution, and representative calibration and validation datasets. Discontinuities and trade-offs in these components constrain the records available for studying inland waters and their change. We examine three gaps affecting inland water remote [...]
“Grand” petit-spot volcanism off the Japan Trench
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Petit-spot volcanoes are a recently discovered type of small intraplate volcanoes that erupt on the outer rise of subducting plates. At petit-spot regions on the outer rise of the Japan Trench, an anomalously shallow acoustic basement reflector is widely distributed, leading to the hypothesis that it corresponds to sills or sheet-like lava flows and is associated with petit-spot magmatism. Here [...]
Validating and Comparing Open InSAR Vertical Land Motion Products: Lessons from Three Cases
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Education, Engineering
Open, satellite-derived vertical land motion (VLM) products are increasingly used to estimate relative sea-level rise and coastal hazard, often well beyond the studies that produced them. Researchers often infer the reliability of these VLM products from agreement with other products rather than validating them against independent observations. Researchers then sometimes attribute differences [...]