Preprints
There are 6976 Preprints listed.
Facilitating AI-Driven Sustainability: A Service-Oriented Ar-chitecture for Interoperable Environmental Data Access
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology, Software Engineering, Sustainability
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly agentic AI, have created opportunities to enhance global sustainability by improving the efficiency and accuracy of environmental monitoring and response systems. Agentic AIs autonomously plan and execute towards specific goals with minimal or no human intervention; however, accessing environmental data is challenging and requires expertise, [...]
Intensifying Seismicity beneath Mount Teide: Assessing the Probability of an Imminent Eruption on Tenerife
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Volcanology
Recent seismic swarms in the western sector of the Las Cañadas Caldera (Tenerife, Canary Islands) have raised concerns regarding the potential for renewed eruptive activity at Teide. Although the earthquakes were of small magnitude and occurred at depths of around 6-12 km, their detection and media coverage generated public concern on an island visited by millions of tourists each year. Teide [...]
Characterization of the Kinematics of the Cordillera Blanca Normal Fault from InSAR
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
The Cordillera Blanca Normal fault (CBNF), located along the western margin of the Cordillera Blanca batholith in northern Peru, is a major extensional structure of the central Andes. Geological and geomorphological evidence indicates sustained slip over the past ~4 Ma, yet its present-day kinematics have not been quantified geodetically. Here, we use Sentinel-1 InSAR (Interferometric [...]
Assessing the medium-term risk to reef damage and rubble generation for the Great Barrier Reef
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Coral reef systems live in multi-hazard environments and are exposed to a wide range of disturbance events that operate at different spatial and temporal scales. We identify seven drivers derived from hazards that have and can result in reef damage in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR): waves, winds, bottom current velocity, coral bleaching, crown-of-thorns seastar outbreaks, ship groundings, and [...]
Meteorological Drought Magnitude, Duration, and Intensity in the Past and Future Climate of Eastern Tigray, Northern Ethiopia
Published: 2026-04-03
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Drought assessment is a critical component of risk management in the comprehensive analysis of drought impacts. This study assessed the meteorological drought events under the past and future climate of Eastern Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, with the principal objective of enhancing early warnings and better drought disaster response mechanisms. To predict future climate, delta scenarios were created [...]
Non-peer reviewed Report submitted to Seismica: Correlation of DAS Strain Data and Oceanographic Variables in the North-East Atlantic
Published: 2026-03-18
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Oceanography
DAS recordings close to the coast are influenced by pressure signals from land- and seaward ocean surface gravity waves. The amplitude and period of the signal can serve as proxies for the sea state. Measurements along the cable at greater water depths show secondary microseisms related to the sea state away from the shore. The significant wave height (SWH) and ocean currents along the cable can [...]
snowman: an open-source R package for automated 30-m snow and ice cover mapping using the Landsat archive
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Glaciology, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Seasonal snow and ice cover are critical components of the cryosphere yet mapping their dynamics at ecologically relevant spatiotemporal scales remains challenging. Here I present snowman, an open-source R package and algorithm for automated mapping of snow and ice cover dynamics at 30-m resolution using Landsat satellite imagery (1982–present). The algorithm combines globally trained [...]
The Oceanic Response to Winds in the Antarctic Sea Ice Loss at the end of the 1970s
Published: 2026-03-28
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The sea ice extent (SIE) in the Southern Ocean experienced a substantial decline in the late 1970s, although less pronounced than the one observed in 2016. Though several studies explain the decline since 2016, the 1970s drop is critical in understanding the long-term variability of SIE. To investigate the underlying mechanisms for this decline, we conducted wind stress-forced multi- ensemble [...]
From environmental observation to shared narratives through human-AI interaction
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A structural bottleneck limits sustainability practices: many people can participate in environmental observation, but far fewer can participate in the synthesis work that turns observations into shared narratives that guide action. We term this disparity "synthesis inequality". Citizen-science programs have expanded public access to data collection, yet data interpretation largely remains [...]
Modeling Heterogeneous Subnational Climate Action through a Sectoral Tiering Framework: Implications for U.S. Decarbonization Pathways
Published: 2026-05-16
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
State governments play a critical role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to meet the United States’ Paris Agreement targets. However, states vary widely in their capacities and inclinations for enacting climate mitigation policies. Here, we present a sectoral tiering framework to assess state-level mitigation performance across sectors. We implement the tiering system in an integrated [...]
Direction-dependent permeability and resistivity of fractured rocks tuned to New Zealand geothermal reservoirs
Published: 2025-10-17
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding permeability in the Earth is vital to optimizing sustainable resource development such as geothermal. In many geothermal fields, permeability is controlled by faults, resulting in high spatial and directional variability, difficult to characterise without costly drilling. Electrical resistivity, however, can be measured from the surface, and like permeability, is sensitive to fluids [...]
Upper Crustal Control on Nearshore Subduction Mechanics in Cascadia
Published: 2026-04-24
Subjects: Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
Along-strike upper plate heterogeneity is widely observed at subduction margins, but its direct influence on slab geometry and interseismic deformation remains debated. Here, we investigate the effect of upper-crustal geological segmentation on nearshore subduction mechanics at the Cascadia margin. Using a high-resolution, shore-crossing 3-D seismic tomography model from central to southern [...]
Canada's Landfill Methane Inventories: The Challenge of Accurate Modeled and Measurement-Based Emissions
Published: 2025-11-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences
We present a measurement-based assessment of methane emissions from 42 landfills across diverse climatic regions in Canada. Our findings reveal that emission rates predicted by the First Order Decay (FOD) model used by Environment and Climate Change Canada at the visited sites are substantially higher than most measured emission rates, on average by a factor of 3, particularly for cold and arid [...]
Arctic summer cloud optical properties and annual sea-ice retreat
Published: 2026-03-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Changes in Arctic sea-ice areal coverage have major ecological, climate, and economic implications and are driven by diverse natural and anthropogenic forcings acting over a wide range of time scales. Cloud-related variability in atmospheric radiative budgets is suspected to be particularly important in year-to-year changes in ice melt. Here, we describe a decade of pan-Arctic satellite light [...]
Reassessing long-term exhumation rates in magmatic terranes
Published: 2026-05-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Tectonics and Structure
Crustal exhumation is central to mountain building, weathering, and sediment production processes, which significantly influence the composition and behavior of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. It also controls the formation, enrichment, and preservation of porphyry copper deposits, which are a vital source of metals for the clean energy technologies underpinning the global green energy transition. [...]