Preprints
There are 7369 Preprints listed.
Distributed Acoustic Sensing Recordings of Cryoseismicity Enable Seismic Imaging of Permafrost in Remote Arctic Regions
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Glaciology
Permafrost can be highly heterogeneous, and variability in its subsurface structure under climate warming remains poorly understood despite the critical role of permafrost in Arctic hydrology, ecosystems, and infrastructure stability. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) provides a long-term method for dense seismic array monitoring in remote regions with passively recorded seismic activities. We [...]
Thin Ice DEM Model Based on Smoothed Elements: A 2.5-Dimensional DEM Approach for Ice–Structure Interaction Simulation
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The user wants just the updated abstract in plain text format, with α removed.` We present a novel 2.5-dimensional Discrete Element Method (DEM) model, termed the Thin Ice Model (TIM), for efficient simulation of ice-structure interactions in broken and unbroken sea ice fields. The model is based on Voronoi tessellation of a single-layer ice sheet, where the ratio of element area to thickness [...]
SCI-VIS: Lightweight Visibility Tagging for Coastal Camera Monitoring
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Automated assessment of imaging conditions is a necessary pre-processing step for any computer vision pipeline deployed on outdoor cameras subject to atmospheric variability. We describe SCI-VIS, a lightweight per-frame visibility classifier deployed within the Surfline Coastal Intelligence (SCI) pipeline. The Surfline coastal-camera network spans ~1,200 cameras worldwide. SCI-VIS tags each [...]
Assessing the protective role of active agriculture in wildfire exposure in a Mediterranean region
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Geography
Global change and rural abandonment are restructuring Mediterranean fire regimes, as landscapes once characterized by heterogeneous agricultural mosaics are progressively replaced by homogenized, drought-limited fuel complexes. This transformation increases the likelihood of high-intensity wildfire events and their associated impacts. This study applied a stochastic fire-spread modeling framework [...]
A Blueprint for Modern Floodplain Management: System Requirements and Architecture for AI-Ready Platforms
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Floodplain managers play a critical role in mitigating flood risks and ensuring compliance with federal, state, and local regulations. Their daily work often depends on a patchwork of standalone tools, manual processes, and legacy systems that have evolved over time to meet regulatory and community needs. To establish a foundation for next-generation technological solutions, we synthesized [...]
Stress-Conditioned Lightweight Flash-Drought Detection in the US Corn Belt Using MODIS NDVI and ERA5-Land
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Hydrology, Meteorology
Flash-drought monitoring by classical indices averages predictive signal across calm and stressed years, blunting the signal exactly where it matters. We show empirically that the coupling between precipitation, soil moisture, vapor pressure deficit (VPD), and NDVI is stress-conditional: the hydrological pathway is visible when vegetation is already under stress (Spearman rho of about 0.18 for [...]
Northward Dust-Induced Shift of Tropical Atlantic Precipitation in CMIP6 Models
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mineral dust has substantially increased since the pre-industrial period, particularly over North Africa and the Atlantic Ocean. However, the impacts of increased dust burden over the tropical Atlantic Ocean on the position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and regional precipitation remain poorly resolved. Here, we analyze seven CMIP6 models participating in the Aerosol Chemistry [...]
Intermediate-Evidence Substitution: A Benchmark Design Methodology for Isolating Numerical Derivation from Protocol Execution in Deterministic Climate Verification
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We introduce \textbf{Intermediate-Evidence Substitution (IES)}, a benchmark design methodology that changes evidence granularity while preserving task semantics: decisive aggregate statistics in benchmark evidence are replaced with the raw intermediate values from which they are derived, while task labels, decision protocols, thresholds, and evaluation criteria remain unchanged. IES functions as [...]
Residential Structure-Resolved Fuel Loading for Emissions Estimation in a Wildland–Urban Interface Fire
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Engineering
Fuels in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) include a variety of anthropogenic materials connected to historical and socio-economic backgrounds in addition to biomass. Yet current emission inventories rely on uniform fuel loading factors (FLFs) that treat all structures as compositionally identical. In this study, we develop a structure-resolved combustible fuel inventory for ~5,400 single-family [...]
Machine Learning-Based Sedigraph Reconstruction for Enhanced Sediment Yield Estimation in the Upper Blue Nile Basin
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Sediment-laden runoff in Ethiopia’s Upper Blue Nile Basin (UBNB) threatens the ecological balance of Lake Tana and the operational efficiency of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a critical hydropower infrastructure. High sediment loads, driven by intense monsoon rainfall and erodible soils, exacerbate erosion and sedimentation, affecting water quality and the longevity of [...]
Detecting illegal water abstractions using Earth Observation and artificial intelligence: challenges, research gaps, and future directions
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Remote Sensing, Water Resource Management
Water scarcity and unsustainable withdrawals are major environmental challenges, particularly in semi-arid and Mediterranean regions where agriculture places strong pressure on limited hydrological resources. Illegal or unreported water abstractions intensify these pressures by undermining ecosystem stability, policy compliance, and long-term water security. Although Earth Observation (EO) and [...]
Thermal migration and climatic de-territorialisation of North American professional sports leagues, 1950–2025
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography
Over the past seven decades, the four major North American professional sports leagues (NHL, MLB, NBA, NFL) have expanded and relocated across the continent, shifting their collective geography towards the Sun Belt. We quantify the climatic consequences of this movement by combining the complete franchise location history of the four leagues from 1950 to 2025 with ERA5-Land reanalysis data and [...]
SCI-OBS: Detection and Classification of People on the Beach and in the Surf Zone
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Understanding how many people use beaches and surf zones is vital for safety, tourism, and coastal management. Traditional manual headcounts are time-consuming and inconsistent, while existing automated systems often fail in complex conditions due to glare, waves obstructing the view, and the small apparent size of distant subjects. We present SCI-OBS, an automated multi-class detector deployed [...]
Using tectonic block modeling to quantify the impact of potentially–active faults on seismic hazard and risk in western Canada
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Tectonics and Structure
In order to understand the impact of large, potentially active faults on seismic hazard and risk in western Canada, faults in the region are characterized using a geodetic-geologic block model. The results are then integrated into Canada's existing national seismic hazard and risk models. To do this, potentially active faults are mapped to build a block model around them; then, several thousand [...]
Trigger or driver? Tracing the role of climate variability since the Little Ice Age in the abandonment of mountain villages in the Eastern Pyrenees: evidence from historical documents
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Environmental Studies
In recent decades, rural depopulation has emerged as a widespread phenomenon across much of Europe, driven by shared underlying processes but shaped by region-specific dynamics. Understanding how climate variability interacts with socioeconomic dynamics to drive long-term settlement abandonment is critical in the context of current global change. High-mountain regions are particularly sensitive [...]