Preprints
There are 8001 Preprints listed.
Fault roughness as a driver of rupture complexity in fluid-induced microearthquakes
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Subsurface fluid-injection can induce microearthquakes whose rupture complexity and arrest mechanisms remain poorly understood, limiting our ability to assess the seismic hazard associated with geo-energy applications. We investigate how fault roughness modulates the response of fluid-pressurized faults using an ensemble of 1395 3D dynamic rupture simulations on self-similar rough faults, varying [...]
ENSO, weather regimes, and U.S. heating degree days
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Heating degree days (HDDs; the number of degrees by which average daily temperature falls below 65°F) quantify heating demand and are used to manage weather-related financial risk. Here we examined the relation of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with U.S. cold-season HDDs over the period 1979–2026 in NOAA Climate Division data and observations from stations that are used to settle publicly [...]
The cost of tree cover loss: quantifying global extinction rates per million hectares
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: To quantify the relationship between annual tree cover loss and changes in extinction risk across terrestrial vertebrates, expressing responses as both absolute numbers of species associated with each IUCN threat category per million hectares of tree cover loss and relative odds of assignment to higher-risk categories. Location: Global. Time period: Contemporary period. Major taxa: [...]
A tale of two temperature extremes: exploring how exposure to extreme heat or cold affects mental health and wellbeing in the UK
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Background and Objective The UK's climate change vulnerability to extreme temperatures, hotter summers and milder winters, and emerging evidence on climate change and mental health require further empirical research. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between exposure to extreme temperatures and mental health and wellbeing outcomes across the UK. We also examined whether [...]
The Elastic Stiffness C13 in Transversely Isotropic Shales
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Shales are often anisotropic due to fine-scale layering and preferred alignment of clay particles with bedding. They may be approximated as transversely isotropic (TI) media with symmetry axis (x3) perpendicular to bedding. TI media have five independent elastic stiffnesses C11, C33, C55, C66 and C13, with C12 = C11−2C66. While C11, C33, C55 and C66 may be estimated from velocities measured [...]
Association of Atmospheric River Frequency over the Western Himalayas with Large scale Modes of Climate Variability
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Winter atmospheric rivers (ARs) contribute substantially to precipitation in the Western Himalaya, but how large-scale climate modes jointly influence their frequency remains unclear. Using 19 climate modes and their interactions over 39 winters (1980-2018), we combine correlation, phase-composite analysis of integrated vapor transport (IVT), and linear, generalized linear (GLM) and generalized [...]
On the Origin of Directional Variability in Earthquake Response Spectra: A Stochastic Covariance Framework
Published: 2026-03-22
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology
Directional variability of horizontal earthquake response spectra is commonly described using rotation-based measures such as RotD50 and RotD100, yet its physical and statistical origin remains unclear. This study shows that directional anisotropy arises fundamentally from finite-sample fluctuations of the covariance matrix of filtered ground-motion response. Even under perfectly isotropic [...]
Metal Toxin Signatures in the Smoke of Wildland–Urban Interface Fires
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Wildland–urban interface (WUI) fires burn natural and built environments simultaneously, generating smoke from vegetation, soil, buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure. Airborne metals can provide source signatures and pose inhalation hazards, yet the sources and physicochemical properties of these metals in WUI fire smoke remain poorly resolved. This uncertainty limits identification of burned [...]
How climate-related events become climate governance problems: climate change attribution divergence as an interpretive mechanism
Published: 2026-11-01
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate-related events are often viewed as potential catalysts for policy learning and changes in climate governance. Floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other environmental changes can expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, land-use planning, and emergency preparedness, drawing attention to the need to reassess existing practices. However, events can be associated with different [...]
Evaluating forecast baselines and network representativeness for daily PM2.5 in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
An order-fair attribution of daily PM2.5 predictability in the Kathmandu Valley assigns 72% of achievable error reduction to persistence, 19% to meteorology and 9% to day-of-year climatology, with the latter two largely redundant; no fitted model, including random forests and gradient boosting tuned by nested chronological cross-validation, outperforms an unfitted lag-1 forecast (11.22 µg m-3). [...]
Automated identification, industrial attribution and conditional emission-rate quantification of recurrent CO enhancement source regions from TROPOMI observations
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Remote Sensing
The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) repeatedly measures global carbon monoxide (CO) total columns, but industrial CO studies generally begin with known cities or facilities; a general method is therefore needed to discover where enhancements recur globally. We developed an automated workflow that searches without facility coordinates. A weakly supervised model screens scenes for [...]
Topology-Aware Quality Control of Triangulated Terrain Models Using Local Euler Curvature and Elevation-Filtration Curves
Published: 2026-09-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Triangulated irregular networks (TINs) are widely used to represent topography and bathymetry, but their quali-ty control is usually dominated by geometric criteria such as minimum angle and aspect ratio, which do not test whether connectivity errors have changed the topology of the mesh. We present a topology-aware quali-ty-control framework based on a local Euler-curvature identity and on [...]
Asthenosphere rheology and the continental-scale interseismic deformation driven by repeated megathrust earthquakes: Insights from the South American plate
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology
This study presents a framework for quantifying large-scale interseismic deformation of a tectonic plate overlying a viscoelastic asthenosphere. We explain and compare four common methods for modelling upper-plate surface deformation induced by time-dependent slip on the subduction interface. One method is a widely used, purely elastic model. The other three are viscoelastic models, in which slip [...]
Pathogen releases due to inadequate wastewater treatment infrastructure in small-town Alabama
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Engineering, Public Health
Residents of the Alabama Black Belt lack safe and reliable wastewater treatment. Health risks of inadequate treatment are well-established, community-level contamination alone cannot characterize how sanitation failures translate into exposure risks, and few studies have identified pathogens associated with exposure. We surveyed of sanitation-related pathogen releases in a small town in Hale [...]
Ecosystem community structure shapes carbon dynamics in the ocean
Published: 2026-10-19
Subjects: Climate, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding how marine ecosystems influence air–sea CO2 flux under climate change remains a major uncertainty in ocean carbon-cycle projections. Progress is hampered by insufficient representation of ecosystem complexity in climate models and insufficient observations for developing and calibrating complex marine ecosystem models. We present a novel three-branch ensemble of the PlankTOM12 [...]