Preprints
There are 6196 Preprints listed.
Linking Water Temperature Variability to Water Quality Dynamics in Beck Lake, an Urban Inland Lake in Chicago (2020–2024)
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Abstract This study examines the effect of climate variability on water quality in Beck Lake, an inland urban lake in Chicago, Illinois, from 2020 to 2024. The lake is maintained by the Chicago Park District and contains aquatic life such as Bluegill, Largemouth Bass, and Northern Pike. To determine climate influence, satellite-derived water temperature data were analyzed using time series [...]
FEMA Phase-Out? Catastrophic Extremes Limit Decentralization of U.S. Flood Insurance
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Risk Analysis, Sustainability, Systems Engineering
The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) faces growing solvency and affordability pressures amid proposals to decentralize FEMA and shift disaster management to states. Many catastrophic floods span state boundaries, exposing multiple decentralized insurance pools simultaneously. Using a path-independent simulation framework that integrates risk-based premiums, [...]
Crystalline silica content of natural, engineered, and synthetic stone products and their relation to silicosis policy development
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Materials Science and Engineering, Public Health
Crystalline silica minerals – quartz, cristobalite, and tridymite – are hazardous when inhaled. They are at least an order of magnitude more toxic than crystalline silica-free inert mineral dusts. Workplace exposure to hazardous levels of crystalline silica is entirely preventable, yet accelerated silicosis is emerging in developed countries, from the fabrication of crystalline silica-rich [...]
Pressure-driven microbial and viral dynamics on individual sinking particles: implications for carbon cycling
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Marine Biology, Oceanography
The ocean’s biological carbon pump (BCP) regulates atmospheric CO2 by exporting organic carbon from the surface to the deep ocean. This process mainly depends on microbial communities associated with sinking particles which produce, degrade and transform organic matter. While many factors impact the efficiency of the BCP, here, we focus on particle heterogeneity and hydrostatic pressure, i.e. the [...]
Targeted weather regimes identify circulation patterns behind Western European summer heat extremes and trends
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology
Western European heat extremes have intensified in recent decades, with their rate of warming outpacing the global mean. Against this general human-induced warming trend, understanding the circulation patterns that drive such heat extremes is crucial. Weather-regime (WR) approaches have been widely used to characterise large-scale circulation variability; however, conventional classifications are [...]
Two-thirds of new fossil fuel infrastructure targets critical ecosystems, elevating health risks for millions
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
While the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate change is well established, the elevated risks to fenceline communities and critical ecosystems remain underexplored at a global scale, limited to a handful of prior coarse assessments. Here we map over 18,000 operating fossil fuel facilities across 170 countries, and assess their placement in surrounding populations and ecosystems, [...]
Reducing the global human footprint on lake water quality near river inlets
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Other Environmental Sciences, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Human activities have degraded lake water quality globally, leading to toxic algae proliferation and anoxia. The spatial variability of these impacts within lakes and the potential for targeted nutrient pollution reduction to improve water quality remain however underexplored at the global scale. Using 742 million chlorophyll-a (chl-a) estimates from six satellite sensors (daily, 1–4 km [...]
Quantification Error Model for Aerial LiDAR Methane Emission Rate Estimates
Published: 2025-11-11
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Statistical Models
Accurate characterization of methane emission rate quantification error (QE) is essential for building measurement-based emissions inventories that benchmark emissions, guide mitigation, and satisfy reporting frameworks such as OGMP 2.0. Previous studies have summarized QE using distributions of errors from controlled release experiments, but with limited consideration of environmental conditions [...]
Accelerating Geothermal Modeling with Low- and High-Fidelity Fourier Neural Operators
Published: 2025-11-11
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Geothermal reservoir models are costly to build and calibrate, and generating a single forecast can take hours. Operators tasked with field planning and optimization are constrained by the speed of these forecast simulations, limiting the number of scenarios they can explore. Machine learning can be a powerful tool to speed up computationally expensive tasks, but standard approaches using Neural [...]
The Tocantins Framework: A Machine Learning-Based Assessment of Intra-urban Thermal Anomalies
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Statistics and Probability, Sustainability
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect has been extensively studied at the city scale. Yet, the Intra-Urban Heat Island and the Intra-Urban Cool Island effects remain poorly characterized due to the absence of standardized quantification frameworks. This study introduces the Tocantins Framework, a dual-metric system combining machine learning and spatial morphology to identify and quantify [...]
Extratropical forcing of low-latitude subsurface oxygenation under future warming
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The global ocean is losing oxygen under climate warming, yet most climate models project rising oxygen levels in low-latitude subsurface waters (~100–500 m), partly due to their enhanced ventilation. However, underlying drivers for the enhanced ventilation remain unclear. Here we demonstrate that the enhanced tropical subsurface ventilation is driven by extratropical forcing. While extratropical [...]
The Anthropocene: epoch, event, historical phase or nothing at all?
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences
After its recent rejection as a geological epoch of the Geological Time Scale, t he Anthropocene is a concept in search of a definition, and action in this regard is urgently needed. Following its rejection, we can no longer speak of the Anthropocene in a general sense, as if everyone understood what it means. The greatest precision we can currently achieve is to state that the term refers to the [...]
Flood Radar: Multi-Sensor SAR-Based Flood Mapping and Evacuation Modeling — A Case Study of the July 2025 Texas Flood
Published: 2025-11-08
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Sciences
Floods remain among the most destructive natural hazards worldwide, causing an average of USD 40 billion in annual damage and affecting more than 2.5 billion people between 1994 and 2014. The Central Texas flood of July 2025 was one of the most catastrophic in recent decades, triggered by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry that delivered over 508 mm of rain within two days. This study presents [...]
Spatiotemporal dynamics of air pollution and vegetation health in a rapidly urbanizing city in northeastern Bangladesh
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Geography
Air pollution poses a significant environmental concern and is recognized as the fourth leading risk factor affecting human health. Understanding the levels of air pollution and its relationships with vegetation is crucial for assessing health risks under rapid urbanization. In this study, using the extracted imagery from the Sentinel-5 and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) [...]
Multi-Agent Geophysical AI Workflow for Automated Reservoir Characterization
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology
Traditional geophysical workflows like reservoir characterization are driven in a collaborative manner where teams of geoscientists share their individual analyses to inform key decisions made by executives. However, these workflows are repetitive, time-consuming, prone to human error, and introduce subjective bias. While researchers have used automation to address these limitations via deep [...]