Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
Seventeen city types define distinct pathways for climate mitigation and adaptation worldwide
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Planetary Sciences
Understanding that cities are main arenas of climate action, it remains unclear which cities should focus on what kind of action taking a global comparative lens. Recent contributions identified four different types of cities across seven world regions, while others specified a huge case study literature database on cities and climate change biased towards established, stagnant, and megacities, [...]
EXPLORATION OF WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT DECISION SUPPORT POTENTIAL IN DATA SCARCE WATERSHEDS AND ASSOCIATED DATA POLICY NEEDS
Published: 2026-04-18
Subjects: Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering, Computational Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Remote Sensing, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Insufficient data access presents major challenges to scientific assessment of water resources, development of management plans, and attainment of water security. Hydrologic models are widely applied in the advisement of pollution, drought, and flood mitigation strategies; their accuracy relies on data used in setup and calibration. A case study of Sasumua River Watershed in Kenya illustrates [...]
Are high-resolution urban datasets necessary for accurate heat exposure modelling in cities?
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Accurately capturing the spatial variability of urban heat exposure is important for planning heat-resilient cities. While regional climate models have historically simplified urban characteristics, high-resolution urban morphological datasets now present an opportunity to produce spatially accurate heat maps. In this vein, this study evaluates four morphological datasets for Sydney, Australia in [...]
Biochar granulation and particle size influence hydrological performance of green roof substrates
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Materials Science and Engineering, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Green roofs are increasingly being implemented in cities to improve stormwater management and provide additional ecosystem services. Biochar, a carbon-rich material derived from pyrolyzed biomass, has emerged as a promising substrate additive to improve hydrological performance of green roofs; however, unprocessed biochar is susceptible to erosion loss. Biochar granulation and particle size [...]
Assessing the potential of the MTG-FCI geostationary mission for the detection of methane plumes
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring
The Flexible Combined Imager on the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG-FCI) provides geostationary observations over Europe and Africa, the Middle East, and parts of South America, and the surrounding waters. The FCI samples the visible, near-infrared and shortwave infrared spectral windows with a spatial resolution at nadir between 500 and 1000 m, and a 10-min temporal sampling. This configuration [...]
An Anisotropy-Aware Framework for Directional Response Spectra and Rotation-Invariant Ground-Motion Measures
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering
Horizontal earthquake ground motion is inherently two-dimensional, yet most engineering applications rely on scalar intensity measures. Rotation-invariant response spectra such as RotD50, MaxRotD50, and RotD100 are widely used to remove dependence on sensor orientation, and are often treated as direction-free scalars, which they are not. In this study, directional pseudo-spectral acceleration [...]
COVID-19 Emission Reductions Reveal the Efficiency and Warming Impact of Short-Lived Greenhouse Gases
Published: 2026-10-05
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The COVID-19 response provided a natural experiment to quantify the climate forcing efficiency of short-lived pollutants. Using satellite-constrained reanalysis and chemistry-climate simulations, we isolate the radiative impacts of anthropogenic NOₓ reductions through two modes: a rapid ozone decrease and a slower methane-driven adjustment that dominates the net effect. Globally, these responses [...]
A Reproducible Framework for the Compressibility of Truncated Spherical-harmonic Planetary Potential-field Models
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology
For a planetary potential field whose degree-variance spectrum decays as a convergent power law σ²_ℓ ∼ ℓ^−α (α > 1), a single measured exponent simultaneously fixes three classically distinct rates: the truncation-error decay rate, the Sobolev smoothness index, and the Kolmogorov n-width rate. Spherical-harmonic degree truncation is the standard yet inherently lossy way to compress such [...]
Constraining Earth's core composition from inner core nucleation.
Published: 2024-08-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Mineral Physics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Planetary Mineral Physics, Planetary Sciences
The composition of Earth’s core is a fundamental property of the Earth’s deep interior, defining its present structure and long term thermal and magnetic evolution. However, the composition of the core is not well understood, with several combinations of light elements being able to satisfy the traditional constraints from cosmochemistry, core formation and seismology.The traditional view of [...]
Duration of Super-Emitting Oil & Gas Methane Sources
Published: 2025-05-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The duration of super-emitting events in oil & gas basins remains poorly understood but is key for informing reporting programs and mitigation strategies. Carbon Mapper conducted intensive aerial surveys from April 30 to May 17, 2024, over the New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin to estimate super-emitter durations directly from observations, covering 276,000 wells, 1100 compressor [...]
Precipitation-driven typology of storms in the Alps
Published: 2025-08-14
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Advances in precipitation science often depend on categorizing storms into homogeneous classes, particularly convective- and stratiform-like. To address this need, this study introduces an Alpine storm typology derived from the pairing of a vast sub-hourly gauge dataset, comprising over 790,000 independent storms, with an objective method, driven solely by precipitation features and optimized for [...]
BEYOND PREDICTION: A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR ADVANCED AI IN AFRICAN SOIL INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Published: 2026-09-28
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Dynamical Systems, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Soil Science, Sustainability
Digital soil mapping has produced the first continent-wide baseline estimates of soil properties in Africa, yet existing soil information systems remain fragmented, poorly standardized, and largely confined to static offline spatial prediction. Their ability to capture near-real-time soil conditions or provide timely, field-level decision support is therefore limited. This paper argues that the [...]
The Role of Flexure Margins in Controlling Open Fracture Distribution: Insights from Analogue Modeling of Orthogonal Rift and Pull-Apart Systems
Published: 2026-02-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
Hydrocarbon exploration in Basement Fracture Reservoirs faces significant challenges in predicting fracture connectivity below seismic resolution. This study utilizes analogue sandbox modeling to compare the spatial distribution of open fractures in orthogonal normal fault systems and pull-apart basins. Methodological innovation is implemented through the use of a 1 mm thick gypsum layer atop 8 [...]
Decomposing drivers of global temperature change after net zero
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Net-zero CO2 (NZCO2) and greenhouse gas emission (GHG) targets are central to the development of mitigation scenarios. Global surface air temperature (GSAT) change after NZCO2 depends on several factors that broadly fall into two categories: scenario-specific factors that account for the diversity of possible mitigation pathways to net zero and beyond, and model-specific factors that describe the [...]
Machine Learning and Explainable AI for Agricultural Drought Prediction: A Comparative Analysis of Gradient Boosting Methods Using Multi-Source Earth Observation Data
Published: 2026-02-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Life Sciences
Drought monitoring and prediction remain critical challenges in climate science and agricultural management, particularly under accelerating climate change. This study presents a comprehensive machine learning framework for drought susceptibility mapping in Iowa, USA, using multi-source Earth observation data and explainable artificial intelligence. We systematically evaluated eleven supervised [...]