Preprints
There are 6976 Preprints listed.
Mapping Responsible AI Workflows for Geospatial Data Science: Developing the I-GUIDE Data Ethics Toolkit
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Library and Information Science, Sustainability
AI workflows in geospatial data science promise substantial societal benefits yet pose persistent challenges of ethical risk, transparency, and reproducibility. Current guidance, ranging from high‑level principles to isolated documentation templates, remains difficult to translate into day‑to‑day research practice, especially for teams operating under tight deadlines. This paper reports the [...]
Enhancing and Interpreting Deep Learning for Sea Ice Charting using the AutoICE Benchmark
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography
Accurate mapping of sea ice is crucial for marine navigation and monitoring climate change. Automating sea ice mapping remains challenging due to remotely-sensed signal ambiguity, the dynamic nature of sea ice, and limited field measurements. The AutoICE challenge recently introduced a benchmark to advance deep learning for sea ice mapping. Top-performing solutions used the U-Net architecture [...]
Holocene oscillatory sea level: literature review and implications for imminent anthropogenic multi-metre transgression
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The famous 1961 'Fairbridge Curve' of Holocene sea level (SL) shows metre-scale (up to ~5m) oscillations, based on a worldwide compilation of carbon-dated geological data-points. Dozens of later authors found further evidence for such fluctuations; while dozens of others, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), deny oscillations >50cm. The debate is settled here by (1) [...]
Helmets Labeling Crops: Kenya Crop Type Dataset Created via Helmet-Mounted Cameras and Deep Learning
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Accurate, up-to-date agricultural monitoring is essential for assessing food production, particularly in countries like Kenya, where recurring climate extremes, including floods and droughts, exacerbate food insecurity challenges. In regions dominated by smallholder farmers, a significant obstacle to effective agricultural monitoring is the limited availability of current, detailed crop-type [...]
Unlocking the potential of single stations to replace seismic arrays
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We introduce Virtual Seismic Arrays, which predict full array recordings from a single reference station, eliminating the need for continuous deployment of all stations. This innovation can reduce costs and logistical challenges while maintaining multi-station functionality. We implement a Virtual Seismic Array using a deep learning encoder-decoder approach to predict transfer properties between [...]
Swiss data quality: augmenting CAMELS-CH with isotopes, water quality, agricultural and atmospheric chemistry data
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
In the era of large-sample hydrology (LSH) datasets, there is still limited availability of water quality data. Here, we introduce CAMELS-CH-Chem, an extension of CAMELS-CH (Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-sample Studies in Switzerland), incorporating up to 40 water quality parameters for 115 catchments across Switzerland. This new dataset spans the period 1981–2020 and allows for [...]
Can large language models effectively reason about adverse weather conditions?
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Engineering
This paper seeks to answer the question “can Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively reason about adverse weather conditions?”. To address this question, we utilized multiple LLMs to harness the US National Weather Service (NWS) flood report data spanning from June 2005 to September 2024. Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer (BART), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from [...]
From natural variability to flow homogenisation: how dams, water diversions, and climate change reduced seasonal flows in Australia’s Murrumbidgee River
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
River regulation and climate change have profoundly altered seasonal flow dynamics globally, with cascading ecological impacts on freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. Magnitude and timing are key components of the flow regime, connecting rivers with floodplains and driving feeding and breeding cues for aquatic organisms. We investigated the separate and combined effects of water resource [...]
Towards HydroLLM: Approaches for Building a Domain-Specific Language Model for Hydrology
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Engineering
As large language models (LLMs) continue to expand, their effective adaptation to specialized fields remains a critical challenge. This work presents an initial step toward the development of HydroLLM, a domain-specific LLM for hydrology. We construct a dataset of approximately 8,800 hydrology-focused question–answer pairs, each with a supporting context passage drawn from textbooks and [...]
Dual-Layer Gradient-Boosted Equivalent Sources for Magnetic Data
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Magnetic data often require interpolation onto a regular grid at constant height before further analysis. A widely used approach for this is the equivalent sources technique, which has been adapted over time to improve its computational efficiency and accuracy of the predictions. However, many of these adaptations still face challenges, including border effects in the predictions or reliance on a [...]
Trend Analysis of Seasonal Temperature in the Al-Bardi region, Northeastern Libya
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Geography
Abstract: This study investigates seasonal temperature trends in the Al-Bardī region, northeastern Libya, to identify potential climate change over recent decades. Due to limited local meteorological data, NASA POWER's 2-meter temperature records were used. Three statistical tools were applied: the Mann-Kendall test, simple linear regression, and first difference method. Findings from the [...]
Back to Basics: On the Proper Determination of Free-Surface Slope (FSS) in Gradually Varied Open Channel Flows
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
This study is a fundamental evaluation of the fluvial wave propagation in river reaches affected by hysteresis, one of the most complex open-channel topics, materialized in loops and lags among hydraulic variables. Hysteresis processes are still understudied as measurements in natural streams for the whole wave propagation duration are hardly available, while the data from existing gaging sites [...]
Streamflow Hysteresis Analysis through a Deep Dive Budget of the St Venant Momentum Terms
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Hysteretic conditions entail non-unique time-independent relationships in flow variables and are prevalent in the unsteady flow regime of most rivers worldwide. Estimation errors associated with the inability of current monitoring techniques to resolve hysteresis effects could have profound implications when the recorded data is used for water resources management and flood forecasting. A deep [...]
High risk, low concern: The climate perception gap in rural America
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Public Health
Rural communities often demonstrate lower levels of concern and reduced support for climate mitigation and policies. This study examined views of climate risk and political support for climate action in Eastern North Carolina, a largely rural and agricultural region, with limited access to health care, and elevated environmental vulnerability. Understanding climate attitudes in this context is [...]
Institutional barriers to food safety: The irrigated vegetable value chain in Accra, Ghana
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The faecal contamination of irrigation water threatens public health. Although safe practices can mitigate hygiene and food safety risks along the urban irrigated vegetable value chain, their adoption remains limited. A behaviour framework was combined with a participatory approach to explore how institutions influence stakeholders’ capability, opportunity and motivation to adopt safe practices [...]