Preprints
There are 8000 Preprints listed.
SegFormer and SegFormer-UNet for anthropogenic geomorphic feature extraction from land surface parameters
Published: 2026-06-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geology, Geomorphology, Remote Sensing
Accurate, scalable mapping of anthropogenic geomorphic features from high spatial resolution terrain data remains challenging. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel at characterizing local texture and patterns, their limited receptive fields may fail to capture broader spatial context. Transformer-based architectures, such as SegFormer, support stronger long-range dependency modelling, [...]
Ambient Noise Spectroscopy for efficient monitoring of unbiased seismic velocity changes
Published: 2026-03-26
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ambient noise based monitoring of subsurface velocity changes does not require the explicit retrieval of Green's functions by correlation. Velocity variations can directly be observed from the fluctuations in the spectrograms of ambient noise time series or their cross-spectra. This approach is more resource efficient than the conventional Green's function based monitoring and ideally suited for [...]
Multiscale land-atmospheric feedbacks intensify hot droughts over global river-basins
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
When drought and heatwave coincide as hot drought, its impacts exceed the sum of individual hazards. The understanding that hot drought intensifies through soil drying is incomplete. We instead find amplification and suppression of hot droughts over both dry and wet soils, with wet (dry) soil-associated amplification (suppression) being the secondary pathway. Moreover, soil-moisture control on [...]
Machine-learning-based classification of shear-band particles in a discrete-element reverse-fault model
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering
Discrete element method (DEM) simulations provide time-resolved particle-scale information on particle motion, contact forces, rotation, and local deformation. However, these outputs are high-dimensional, making it difficult to directly interpret which particle-level descriptors characterize localized deformation. This study develops a machine-learning workflow for classifying shear-band [...]
Toxic Ultrafine to Nanoparticulate Materials in Wildfire Smoke
Published: 2026-07-08
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Wildfire smoke contains metal-laden ultrafine particles (less than 0.25 µm) systematically overlooked in air quality monitoring, representing a hidden hazard. We show that these ultrafine particles dominate smoke composition, accounting for >60% of particle mass and carrying toxic metals including chromium, nickel, and titanium at sizes down to 5 nm, small enough to penetrate lung barriers and [...]
Increased North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Risk in the Wake of a "Super" El Niño Event
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is among the most influential modes of climate variability on Earth, dramatically reshaping global weather patterns. It is therefore a key driver of regional extremes and has been recognized as a key risk predictor for a wide range of natural hazards, from drought and wildfire to extreme rainfall and flooding. Considerable attention has been paid to the [...]
Bitwise Reproducibility as an Incomplete Correctness Signal: A Structural Audit for Parallel Spectral GCMs
Published: 2026-07-05
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Bitwise reproducibility of an OpenMP-parallelized scientific code is usually verified by checksum comparison on a short run—an inductive leap that carries no guarantee at longer integration lengths. We study it instead as a deductive and diagnostic property of the source text, taking a legacy spectral atmospheric general circulation model, whose time step is a reduction over a partitioned [...]
Storm-source geometry biases mantle transition-zone water estimates from a century-scale geomagnetic archive
Published: 2026-07-12
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Tectonics and Structure
Electromagnetic estimates of water in the mantle transition zone depend on the assumed geometry of storm-time source fields. We audit the effect of that assumption using paired processing chains that differ only by inclusion of a degree-3 zonal source term, together with pre-specified admission gates. The experiment is applied to three separately processed, partially overlapping observatory [...]
AquaContam: machine-learning models of drinking-water contamination learn who is monitored as much as where contamination occurs
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Hydrology
Machine learning informs drinking-water monitoring, yet administrative data record the monitoring process as much as the contamination. Using AquaContam (over 4 million samples from 95,223 U.S. water systems and ambient monitoring locations), we find provenance proxies dominate feature attributions, and an apparent lead-model AUROC of 0.962 is largely a target- leakage artifact (corrected skill [...]
IGM v3.2.1: an accessible, modular, differentiable, and GPU-accelerated high-order ice flow model}
Published: 2026-06-28
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present the Instructed Glacier Model (IGM, v3.2.1), an open-source framework for simulating glacier evolution from single-glacier to mountain-range scales. IGM is built on a single design principle: all physical processes, including ice flow, surface mass balance, thermodynamics, and mass conservation, are expressed as short sequences of operations on raster grids. This workflow runs natively [...]
Efficient continuous land change monitoring with pyxccd and S-CCD 2.0
Published: 2026-03-21
Subjects: Engineering
Continuous change detection from satellite time series requires algorithms that are robust to structural breaks, computationally efficient, and accessible for reproducible large-area processing. We present pyxccd, an open-source, cross-platform Python package for continuous land change monitoring based on dense satellite time series. This package provides high-performance implementations of the [...]
Valley forests as ecological bottlenecks: Topography and resource concentration structure herbivore use in the Western Ghats
Published: 2026-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Large-herbivore distributions in the Western Ghats are often interpreted through the perspective of protected areas, forest loss, and human disturbance. This perspective can undermine the ecological role of valley forests and riparian lowlands in steep, human-modified landscapes. Evidence from Asian elephants and other large herbivores indicates that habitat use is shaped by interacting filters [...]
Sediment accumulation, rather than mixing, controls the temporal resolution of the sedimentological record
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Sedimentary particles such as organismal remains carry information on the Earth’s past. As a result of mixing in surface sediments, particles of different ages can be found at the same depth (time-averaging), and particles of identical ages can be found at different stratigraphic positions (stratigraphic disorder). This results in simultaneous stratigraphic and temporal blurring of the recorded [...]
Model-Based Assessment of Geogenic Radon Exposure in Chaco Canyon and Adjacent Ancestral Puebloan Residential Settings
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Geochemistry, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Paleontology, Sustainability
Naturally occurring radon-222 and its short-lived alpha-emitting progeny are important sources of environmental radioactivity in enclosed, earth-contact spaces, yet their potential relevance to archaeological built environments has rarely been quantified. Here we evaluate chronic radon exposure in Chaco Canyon, where Ancestral Pueblo people occupied earth-contact and semi-subterranean rooms [...]
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 [...]