Preprints
There are 7999 Preprints listed.
What Does a Country-Level Difference-in-Differences on Satellite NO₂ Identify? Baseline Composition, Winter Retrievals and the European Climate Law
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Satellite observations make it easy to compare air pollution in countries that adopted a policy with countries that did not. This paper examines what such a comparison identifies. It uses Sentinel-5P TROPOMI tropospheric NO₂ for 2019–2024 and a country-level difference-in-differences (DiD) model of the European Climate Law that compares the EU-27 with nine neighbouring non-EU countries. NO₂ fell [...]
Ghost Infrastructure: Historical Industrial Geography and the Persistence of Path-Dependent Accessibility in Bochum, Germany
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
The complete 69,393 pedestrian street node network from Bochum was used for a Welch's t-test, which revealed as a surprise that street nodes with low accessibility are actually significantly farther from historical industrial sites than street nodes with high accessibility (t=42.887, p<0.00001, Cohen's d=0.589 - medium-to-large effect), which is the opposite of what the original hypothesis [...]
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, and what they are doing there, is vital for safety, tourism and coastal management. Camera-based studies of coastal recreation have to date recovered attendance: a headcount, sometimes divided into coarse zones. This paper reports the accuracy at which the same infrastructure resolves attendance into activity composition, using a [...]
What Did the Destruction of the Kakhovka Dam Do to Vegetation? Separating Flood, Reservoir and Irrigation Effects with Satellite Data
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
The Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine was destroyed on 6 June 2023. This could have changed vegetation in three ways: through the flood below the dam, the draining of the reservoir, and the loss of water for the irrigation canals. All three happened inside an active war zone. I tested each pathway separately with MODIS NDVI at 250 m resolution for 2016–2024. Treated land was defined by what [...]
Deglacial Mass-Movement Floods as a Potential Source of Catastrophic Flood Traditions: A Testable Geomythological Hypothesis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Glaciology, Hydrology
Catastrophic flood traditions occur in many geographically separated cultures, but their possible geological substrates need not be uniform. Existing explanations include river floods, earthquake and volcanic tsunamis, glacial-lake outburst floods, postglacial sea-level rise, and cultural transmission. This paper proposes a complementary, explicitly testable hypothesis: during the terminal [...]
Interactive effects of landscape position and soil diversity drive the spatial variability of soil organic carbon concentration in subalpine soils of Switzerland
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Soil Science
Subalpine soils store a significant amount of soil organic carbon (SOC), yet the factors driving its landscape-scale variability remain poorly constrained. Although topography, soil type, soil texture, and moisture are recognised as key drivers of SOC concentration, their interactive effects in subalpine environments remain largely unexplored. In particular, the extent to which soil type shapes [...]
Paleomagnetism in tectonics: A user’s guide
Published: 2026-03-21
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Paleomagnetism can reveal the direction of the ancient geomagnetic field recorded in rocks and provides an invaluable quantitative reference for the study of tectonics. This chapter describes the basic principles of how the magnetic field is stored in rocks, how it may be measured, and how common pitfalls in paleomagnetic analysis may be recognized and corrected for. We then explain how [...]
Inverse computational morphology of debris and alluvial fans
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
In mountain areas, debris flows and fluvial transport often build up conical deposits at the confluence between steep tributaries and trunk rivers. The resulting debris and alluvial fans typically exhibit a well-defined relationship between slope or elevation and the distance from the fan apex. This relationship, however, becomes more difficult to characterize when fans are constrained by the [...]
Seasonal Shift in the Dominant Pathway Energizing Mesoscale Eddies in the California Current
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mesoscale eddies are the dominant reservoir of kinetic energy in the ocean, yet the mechanisms that generate and maintain them in eastern boundary current systems remain incompletely assessed. Here we use a 1-km resolution simulation of the California Current System (CCS) to diagnose and quantify the processes that supply kinetic energy to the mesoscale band. A pronounced seasonal transition is [...]
Decadal Trends in Seasonal Climatic Variables in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: A Non-Parametric Approach Using the Mann-Kendall Test
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Background: Coastal cities like Dar es Salaam face an increasing vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate variability, including urban flooding, heat stress, and altered water availability. Examining the temporal evolution of key climatic variables is critical to informing adaptive strategies and promoting sustainable urban development. Methods: Decadal seasonal trends in rainfall, daytime [...]
DOUBLE JEOPARDY: The Vulnerability Spiral of Compound Climate Risk Across 5 Islands
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
Low islands face two threats at once: the sea rising, and the reefs and mangroves that buffer it weakening. I measured both across 5 island groups in 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, Seychelles, Fiji and the Canary Islands), testing mangroves and coral reefs as separate pathways. Exposure is the share of people (WorldPop 2020) living on land at or below 1 m, on a bare earth elevation model [...]
Injecting vegetation-based spatialization in the hydrogeological framework for erosion modelling
Published: 2026-03-31
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biodiversity, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Erosion processes and landslide are widespread across Italy and frequently cause significant damage to people, infrastructure, and ecosystems. These processes are primarily triggered by rainfall events, whose impact depends on multiple interacting factors, including geomorphology, soil properties, land use, and vegetation. Among these, vegetation plays an essential role in regulating hillslope [...]
From "Ion-Adsorption" to "Ion-Adsorbed" Rare Earths: Terminological Drift, AI Paraphrasing, and the Erosion of Geochemical Precision
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for writing and paraphrasing is transforming scientific communication. While such tools can improve linguistic fluency, their misuse, particularly when employed to mechanically rephrase text, may introduce subtle but consequential distortions in scientific terminology. In disciplines such as geochemistry, where terminology is closely tied [...]
The 1908 Tunguska event and some mini-Tunguskas
Published: 2026-03-14
Subjects: Education, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper is a continuation of a series of works, devoted to various aspects of the 1908 Tunguska event. This paper is devoted to several events which can be called as mini-Tunguskas. Their manifestations are in some ways similar to the 1908 Tunguska event, only on a much smaller scale. Often initially such events were interpreted as meteoroidal bolides or even meteorite falls. However, the [...]
Climate Change and Crop Production in The Gambia: Farmers’ Perceptions, Agricultural Practices, and Adaptation Strategies
Published: 2026-09-10
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Background Climate change threatens crop production, food security, and rural livelihoods, particularly where smallholder farmers depend on rain-fed agriculture. The Gambia is exposed to rising temperatures, rainfall variability, droughts, floods, land degradation, and coastal hazards. This study assessed crop farmers' perceptions of climate change, their agricultural practices and adaptation [...]