Preprints
There are 7221 Preprints listed.
From linguistic evaluation to mechanistic verification: testing LLM-generated farm recommendations
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability
Large language models (LLM) are increasingly used to generate farm-management advice, but their biophysical consequences remain largely unverified. We introduce a process-based verification framework that combines management portfolios generated by ChatGPT and Claude with the process-based model LandscapeDNDC across 11 contrasting agroecosystems. The LLMs produced agronomically plausible [...]
A Multi-Pathway Contamination Risk Model for Niger Delta Communities: Integrating Hydrocarbon Load, Heavy Metal Exposure, and Vegetation Stress Indices from Heterogeneous Observational Data
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
The Niger Delta is one of the most petroleum-impacted environments in the world, yet spatially explicit contamination risk assessments that integrate multiple exposure pathways remain scarce. This study presents a Composite Risk Score (CRS) model that fuses heavy metal soil and water measurements from nine peer-reviewed studies, total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) data from the 2011 UNEP [...]
Field-scale soil moisture over Hungary under non-stationary drought transfer: a unified account across surface, region, and depth
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Soil Science
Three questions decide whether a satellite-driven soil-moisture estimator is fit for operational drought monitoring over a heterogeneous country: how accurately can the surface layer be recovered, whether the controlling processes differ across the landscape, and how far the surface signal reaches into the profile that actually matters for plants and recharge. The program began with a national [...]
Multi-scale measurements and temporally resolved modeling of methane emissions at natural gas distribution stations
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH4) emissions from natural gas distribution stations are not well characterized by measurements, contributing to uncertainty in urban emissions inventories and mitigation strategies. We conducted a multi-scale, multi-temporal study of four distribution stations in Calgary, Alberta, combining component- and facility-level measurements with modeling to quantify, attribute, and compare [...]
A multi-indicator framework for assessing the likelihood of ENSO impacts across southern Africa
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant source of seasonal predictability for Southern Africa, yet operational guidance rarely conveys which agriculturally relevant variables it can skillfully predict, or where ENSO impacts are most likely. We present an operational analysis framework that converts an ENSO state, classified by phase and strength, into gridded, analogue-composite [...]
Earth Science Education for Community Preparedness: Place-Based Approaches to Climate, Water, and Natural Hazards in K-12 Schools
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Science and Mathematics Education
This manuscript presents a K-12 Earth science education framework that connects place-based geoscience learning with community preparedness. Earth science education is positioned as a practical pathway for helping students understand weather, climate, water systems, landforms, natural hazards, and human interactions with Earth systems. Drawing on scholarship and guidance from geoscience [...]
Dynamic physiology broadens the molecular composition of kelp-derived dissolved organic matter exported to the coastal ocean
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Metabolites are exuded by marine primary producers and contribute to the pool of dissolved organic matter that structures the ecology and biogeochemistry of marine ecosystems. In the coastal ocean, macroalgae such as kelps fix inorganic carbon via photosynthesis and release a fraction of that carbon as dissolved organic matter. In this study, we characterized the exo-metabolome of the globally [...]
Capturing Time-Resolved Prescribed Fire Emissions with TEMPO Special Observations
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Prescribed fires are widely used for land management in the United States, but their emissions remain difficult to quantify due to their small spatial extent and short duration. We present here the first demonstration that high-resolution "special observations" from the TEMPO geostationary instrument resolve sub-hourly nitrogen dioxide NO2 column enhancements from individual prescribed fires in [...]
Urban Morphology & Climate Hazards: A Systematic Review of Global Evidence, Gaps and Future Directions
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Urban morphology shapes cities’ exposure to climate hazards, yet evidence remains fragmented across across hazard types, urban forms, data sources, analytical approaches, and geographic contexts. This systematic review synthesizes evidence on links between urban morphology and six hazards: urban heat, floods, landslides, air-quality degradation, wildfires, and droughts. We reviewed peer-reviewed [...]
Detecting industrial ammonia and ethylene point sources with the thermal bands of Landsat 8 and 9
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences
Industrial point sources of ammonia (NH₃) and ethylene (C₂H₄) are poorly constrained in current inventories, in part because satellites tend to offer either fine spatial detail or frequent revisits. We show that the two thermal-infrared bands of the Landsat 8 and 9 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), though built for land-surface monitoring, can detect and spatially resolve such plumes at 100 m [...]
Quantifying Watershed Criticality via Deep Learning and Explainable AI for Groundwater Resilience
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is a vital freshwater resource that supports drinking water supply, agricultural sustainability, ecosystem functioning, and drought resilience. As water scarcity and climate change impacts intensify, sustainable groundwater management plays an important role in groundwater management, with groundwater storage (GWS) acting as a key indicator of groundwater resilience. This study [...]
Unraveling the mechanisms behind the triple isotopic composition of dissolved oxygen
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Estimating the evolution of biospheric oxygen production through time is a major challenge. The triple oxygen isotope composition of molecular oxygen (17Δ) has been proposed as a tracer of this production, as it integrates contributions from marine (17Δocean) and terrestrial (17Δterr) biospheric oxygen. The recent implementation of 17Δocean in the intermediate-complexity climate model iLOVECLIM [...]
Predicting the resistivity signature of internal erosion in freshwater embankment dams: anomaly polarity, detectability, and a full-scale benchmark
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Engineering
Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is a standard tool for embankment-dam inspection, and low-resistivity anomalies are conventionally read as leakage or internal erosion. High-resistivity signatures of internal erosion have been reported repeatedly but never derived from petrophysical first principles. We show why: for the freshwater reservoirs and clayey cores of most inland dams, about 97 [...]
Wrack as a Roughness Element: Nonlinear Controls on Wind Reduction and Sediment Deposition in a Coastal Dune System
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Geomorphology
Coastal dunes are shaped by interactions among wind, sediment supply, and surface roughness elements. While vegetation is widely recognized as a driver of aeolian sediment dynamics, beach wrack remains understudied despite its frequent occurrence on sandy coastlines. This study investigated how wrack modifies airflow and influences sediment deposition. Paired 2D anemometers positioned upwind and [...]
Geometrical Assessment of Climate Models in the Drake Passage Using Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Drake Passage is a narrow oceanic bottleneck that also acts as a geographic constriction. Here, both2 the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the Southern Westerly Winds are forced through a topographic gap3 between the Andes and the Antarctic Peninsula, reducing the system’s effective degrees of freedom. This4 study applies Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis (M-SSA) to three surface [...]