Preprints
There are 7435 Preprints listed.
ECMWF SEAS5 Seasonal Precipitation Outlook and Hydrological-Hydrogeological Assessment for the Middle East: August 2026-January 2027
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Food Science, Higher Education, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
This preprint presents a regional hydrological and hydrogeological interpretation of the ECMWF SEAS5 System 51 ensemble-mean precipitation forecast initialized on 1 August 2026 for the Middle East and adjacent portions of the analysis domain. The supplied NetCDF field is time-mean total precipitation rate (tprate; m s^-1), converted to monthly precipitation depth (mm/month) using the actual [...]
Mapping Ice Slabs over Antarctic Ice Shelves using Quad-Polarization L-band Radar Backscatter
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Nearly 3 months of enhanced-resolution, quad-polarization, L-band (1.26 GHz) radar backscatter (σo) image time series are used to map the ice slab extent over the percolation facies of Antarctic ice shelves for the first time from space. Distinctive spatial trends in σo, incidence angle, and polarization signatures mapped via principal component analysis (PCA) are used to develop a [...]
Counting the Solomon Islands: How Many Islands Does the Archipelago Actually Contain?
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Solomon Islands is widely reported to comprise approximately 900--1,000 islands, a figure repeated across government, tourism, and encyclopedic sources without a traceable methodology. We re-examine this figure using two independent, reproducible geospatial datasets: the USGS/Esri/UNEP-WCMC Global Islands database (30 m Landsat-derived classification) and OpenStreetMap (OSM) land polygon data [...]
Flooded Rivers, Drying Wetlands, Vanishing Tributaries: Hydrological Paradox of the East Ganga Plains
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The East Ganga Plains (EGP) present a striking hydrological paradox: while embanked rivers flood with increasing magnitude, adjacent wetlands and groundwater-fed streams are desiccating, and aquifer storage is declining. Using satellite remote sensing and gravimetry, we document that: (i) wetlands exhibit significant water-cover loss despite stable monsoon rainfall; (ii) small rivers and [...]
PyRiverShift: A Gaussian Transect Decomposition Framework for Quantifying Sub-Pixel Lateral Channel Mobility
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Earth Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Water Resource Management
Along many rivers, lateral channel mobility is a key process, yet quantification from freely available multi-decadal 30 m Landsat imagery is constrained by low pixel resolution relative to channel width. We introduce PyRiverShift, a sensor-agnostic spectral decomposition framework. PyRiverShift fits a 1-D Gaussian to NDWI profiles along valley-perpendicular transects, recovering sub-pixel channel [...]
Predicting the reactivity of trawl-disturbed sediment carbon from measurable seabed properties
Published: 2026-08-16
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Mobile bottom-contact fishing gear disturbs a large area of the continental shelf each year. How much carbon that releases depends on how fast the disturbed material is mineralised. Assessments represent that with a first-order rate constant, and because its value is unmeasured they sample it across five orders of magnitude, which makes it their dominant uncertainty. Here the constant is derived [...]
Source-composition sensitivity in historical marine wind observations: a CLIWOC case study, 1750--1855
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Applied Mathematics, Other Computer Sciences
Recovering Climate’s History with Artificial Intelligence used the CLIWOC ship-logbook database to argue that sailors’ wind observations reveal a previously undetected shift in global atmospheric circulation between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We reproduce the article's principal annual aggregate from CLIWOC release 2.1 and find that this unstandardized, record-weighted [...]
Machine-learning predictions of annual lake-level recreational boat traffic in Minnesota
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Other Life Sciences
Recreational boating provides human health and economic benefits, but can also cause harm through introductions of aquatic invasive species (AIS). Minnesota, USA, has a large number of lakes, an active boating community, and a watercraft inspection program that collects data regarding boat launches at select sites. However, there is currently no direct monitoring system that measures boating [...]
A satellite blind spot masks crop residue burning across northern India
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Postmonsoon crop residue burning in the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana is a major source of air pollution and air quality degradation across the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP). Recent satellite observations have revealed an apparent inconsistency between declining fire detections and persistent or increasing atmospheric pollution. Here we combine eight years (2018-2025) of fire observations from [...]
Enhancing High-Impact Rainfall Forecasts via Multi-Sensor, Multi-Stage Variational Data Assimilation in WRF: Insights from the CYGMEN Project
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Assimilating high-resolution radar reflectivity and complementary observation types remains a central challenge for improving short-term quantitative precipitation forecasts of severe Mediterranean weather systems. This study investigates the effect of multi-source data assimilation configurations using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and its three-dimensional variational data [...]
Mineral association drives divergent chemical trajectories of organic sulfur during dryland soil development
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Soil Science
Sulfur (S) deficiency is becoming more widespread as atmospheric S deposition declines, increasing ecosystem reliance on mineralization of soil organic S as a source of plant-available sulfate. Yet how organic S chemistry evolves during soil development, and how this evolution is mediated by microbial processing and mineral association, remains poorly understood, particularly in drylands. Here, [...]
Masked Autoencoding (MAE) Outperforms Joint-Embedding Prediction (JEPA) for Frozen-Probe Very-High-Resolution Landslide Segmentation
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mapping landslides from very-high-resolution (VHR) imagery is central to regional hazard assessment, yet supervised segmentation is constrained by the cost of expert pixel-level annotation. Self-supervised learning can exploit large unlabeled aerial archives, but which pretext objective best captures landslide morphology is unknown. Using a regional inventory from the 2023 Emilia-Romagna rainfall [...]
Field-scale sugarcane mapping in Thailand by fusing annual satellite embeddings with a global field-boundary model, cross-checked against mill weighbridge records
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Engineering
Sugarcane in Thailand is grown almost entirely by smallholders who deliver to mills under seasonal contracts, so the quantities that matter to planning are properties of individual fields rather than of pixels. Published Thai cane maps are per-pixel classifications, and global cane products perform markedly worse in Thailand than elsewhere because cane is confused with cassava. Whether the global [...]
The Coastal Resilience Safety Factor: A General Method for Coastal Design Under Deep Uncertainty, with a Vancouver Application
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Global sea level rise is accelerating, and a substantial portion of the coming rise is now committed regardless of future emissions; coastal cities must therefore shift from preventing the hazard to designing for it. That shift poses a question every other safety-critical discipline already answers in its own domain: how large a design margin a structure should carry when the load is deeply [...]
GIS-Based Assessment of Urbanization Impact on Green Space Dynamics in Awka, Nigeria (1990–2020)
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Education
This research project focuses on assessing the impact of urbanization on green spaces in Awka Urban City, Nigeria, utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The study spans the years 1990 to 2020 and employs Landsat satellite imagery for geospatial analysis. The primary objectives include mapping and quantifying the extent of urbanization, analyzing changes in green space distribution, and [...]