Preprints
There are 8001 Preprints listed.
Hydro Stack: Automated geospatial processing workflow for Water Security Planning
Published: 2026-11-01
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Software Engineering, Water Resource Management
Watershed and micro-watershed delineation underlies a wide range of water security and land management decisions; yet existing global hydrographic products such as HydroSHEDS are static, coarser, and not readily reproducible or adaptable to new regions or scales. We present Hydro Stack, an open-source, end-to-end workflow that automates micro-watershed delineation and hydrological [...]
Global Power Outage Detection at the Kilometer Scale from Satellite Nighttime Lights
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Power and Energy, Public Health, Remote Sensing
Satellite nighttime light observations show great promise for remote sensing of power outages, yet have only been utilized in limited case studies to date. Here, we present generalized detection of power outages across the globe at ~1-kilometer resolution. Our method, the Outage frameWork for Luminosity Interruptions (OWL-I), reveals the power outages can be reliably detected from VIIRS/Black [...]
Krasheninnikov eruption facilitated by M8.8 Kamchatka earthquake and hidden critical state
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Volcanology
Large earthquakes can trigger volcanic eruptions, but the required conditions and mechanisms remain uncertain. Here, we investigate whether the August 2025 eruption of Krasheninnikov volcano, Russia, was facilitated by the July 29th, 2025, Mw 8.8 Kamchatka megathrust earthquake. InSAR observations from 2016 to 2025 show no pre-earthquake inflation and satellite SO2 data indicate no detectable [...]
Light- and CO2-dependent carbon isotope fractionation in the β-cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences
Carbon isotope fractionation during photosynthetic carbon fixation by phytoplankton (εₚ) underpins proxies for reconstructing past atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. The interpretation of εₚ is commonly based on steady-state flux-balance models that link isotopic fractionation to the balance between cellular carbon demand and supply, with Rubisco carboxylation providing the primary fractionating [...]
Methane and nitrous oxide concentrations and sea–air fluxes in western Long Island Sound, a eutrophic urban estuary: Hourly to seasonal variability
Published: 2025-10-06
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Western Long Island Sound is a seasonally hypoxic urban estuary undergoing anthropogenic change, which may influence concentrations and emissions of the potent greenhouse gases methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). To provide a benchmark of current gas distributions in this system, enabling detection of future changes and comparison with data from other estuaries worldwide, we obtained the first [...]
Biological Dynamics for Sustainable Carbon Sequestration
Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biology, Climate, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Forest Management, Planetary Biogeochemistry
Earth’s atmosphere is shaped by the interplay of biological systems operating across interlinked biogeochemical cycles and, more recently, by anthropogenic emissions. Here, we thoroughly examine the potential for engineering biological systems across ecosystems for sustainable carbon storage. This centralization and comparative analysis of the potential of all key global ecosystems aims to [...]
Isochrone overturning in steady glacier flow
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ancient ice recovered at Allan Hills extends into the Miocene, but steep layers, age reversals and folds complicate its interpretation. Whether steady glacier flow can overturn initially ordered layers remains uncertain. Here, we track the horizontal order of particles deposited sequentially at the surface. This order is measured by a signed Jacobian that is equivalent to the inverse [...]
Biomarkers Thermal Maturity Parameters in Bitumen as a Proxy for Seismic vs. Aseismic Mirror-like Fault Surfaces
Published: 2026-09-18
Subjects: Geology
Mirror-like Surfaces (MSs) are ultra-polished fault surfaces that experimental studies have shown can form during seismic and aseismic deformation (slip rates ≈1 m/s vs. <0.0001 m/s). To determine which MSs form during seismic (rapid temperature increase) or aseismic (negligible temperature increase) slip along the fault, we measured sterane and hopane thermal maturity parameters in bituminous [...]
The mortality burden of airborne fine mineral dust in the United States
Published: 2026-09-19
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Regulation under the Clean Air Act has reduced combustion-derived fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the United States, leaving windblown mineral dust—driven by drought, shrinking water bodies, and fallowed farmland—as a growing and largely unregulated share of what remains. Existing mortality burden estimates have had to borrow concentration–response functions from total PM2.5 and disagree [...]
No detectable precursor in Sentinel-1 backscatter before the 26 August 2026 Langtang Lirung rock–ice avalanche, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
On 26 August 2026 a rock–ice avalanche on the west flank of Langtang Lirung, Nepal, initiated a debris flow and flood that ran roughly 100 km down the Lhende Khola, Bhote Koshi and Trishuli. Several contemporaneous reports asserted that satellite radar had tracked a month of accelerating slope movement before failure. This note tests that claim in the amplitude record. Using Copernicus Sentinel-1 [...]
Calibrated detection limits in routine Sentinel-1 products 50.6 hours before the Langtang Lirung rock–ice avalanche, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geomorphology
On 26 August 2026 a rock–ice avalanche detached from Langtang Lirung, Nepal, and released a debris flood that crossed the Nepal–China border. Deformation preceding the failure has since been reported from a multi-month Sentinel-1 stack, and pre-event indications have been identified in commercial optical imagery. Both analyses began from a known failure location. This paper asks a different [...]
The July 2026 North American wildfire smoke event was three times deadlier due to climate change
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In mid-July 2026, numerous fast-burning wildfires affected western Ontario and northern Minnesota, resulting in extensive smoke across eastern North America. Here, we conduct a rapid attribution analysis of the 14–21 July smoke event, quantifying the change in wildfire smoke (WFS) PM2.5 concentrations and mortality compared to a counterfactual world without anthropogenic climate change (ACC). We [...]
Earthquake damage mapping from Sentinel-1 modeling against coherence damage proxy
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper tests whether a supervised model that uses the same Sentinel-1 signal as the coherence damage proxy can rank earthquake damage better than the proxy itself. Damage grades from Copernicus EMS for four earthquakes are joined to 783 635 OpenStreet- Map footprints over 28 assessed areas, and the coherence drop is aggregated to buildings, morphological blocks and cells of 50 m to 400 m. A [...]
A Changing North Atlantic Background Amplifies Western European Heatwaves
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Western European summer heatwaves have increased markedly since the 1990s, culminating in the record warmth of May–July 2026 since 1950. We show that this rise is closely associated with the slowly evolving North Atlantic background. We combine two leading April sea surface temperature modes, representing basin-wide warming and a tripole-like pattern, into an Atlantic Two-Mode Index (ATMI). The [...]
Segmenting submarine boulders with Random Forest and nnU-Net: from bathymetric rasters to survey-scale size distributions
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences
In the soft-bottom-dominated southern Baltic Sea, geogenic hard substrates are biodiversity hotspots. The lack of open-source, pixel-level segmentation approaches for boulders in MBES data has made it difficult to advance the ecological understanding of boulder fields in the Baltic Sea. This study developed and evaluated two segmentation approaches. A deep learning model (nnU-Net) and a classical [...]