Preprints
There are 8001 Preprints listed.
Beyond Hard-to-Abate: Matching Models to Transition Bottlenecks
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Chemical Engineering, Computational Engineering, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oil, Gas, and Energy
In energy-intensive industry, the difficulty of decarbonising is not a uniform property of the emissions involved but a property of the pathway, conditional on identifiable bottlenecks at three interlocking levels. At the process level, heterogeneous products and coupled processes multiply the low-carbon option space. At the firm level, financing premiums and coordination failures across the [...]
Temporal Synchronization Determines the Accuracy of Sentinel-2 Turbidity Retrieval: Evidence from Community-Based Monitoring of the Buriganga River, Dhaka
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Community-based environmental organizations require continuous water quality data but are constrained by the cost and labor of physical sampling. Satellite remote sensing offers a free alternative, yet validation studies of inland waters frequently report weak agreement between satellite indices and ground measurements, and the cause of that disagreement is rarely isolated. This study analyzed 28 [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
Training-Free Monitoring of Kenya with Pre-computed Satellite Embeddings: Lake Expansion, Construction Dating and Crop Retrieval with TESSERA
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Pre-computed embeddings from geospatial foundation models turn the most expensive step of satellite analysis into shared data. We test how much analysis this enables for one country, using TESSERA, which publishes a 128-dimensional embedding for every 10 m pixel and year. An audit of Kenya shows that all 4,766 tiles centred in the country carry all nine years (2017–2025), but that the landmask [...]
Terrain-Dependent Generalization Failure in Multimodal Lunar Crater Classification: A Comparative Study Using Optical and Topographic Data
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Sciences
Automated lunar crater detection is an important task in planetary mapping, geological analysis, and future lunar exploration. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of combining optical imagery with topographic information; however, the influence of terrain variability on crater classification performance remains insufficiently explored. This study presents a comparative evaluation of [...]
Can a Data Repository Survive a Crisis? Development of the Repository Crisis Scorecards
Published: 2026-09-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences
Disaster scenarios are not usually considered by scientists when publishing or archiving data. The goal is often to satisfy more immediate needs and requirements of funders, journal publishers, or collaborators. Yet, recent events around the globe, combined with the increased need for high-quality data to solve large-scale problems, have highlighted the vulnerability of data stored in [...]
Ocean surface currents directly imaged from space
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
For more than four decades, satellite images of ocean temperature and colour have revealed jets, swirling eddies, and filaments. Yet the currents that shape these structures have never been directly imaged from space. This observational gap limits our understanding of the ocean's impact on climate and marine ecosystems, as these currents modulate exchanges between the coast and open ocean, [...]
Mitigating Summertime Marine Heatwaves via Targeted Marine Cloud Brightening
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Marine heatwaves (MHWs) negatively impact marine ecosystems and coastal economies. Here, we evaluate whether a preemptive, short-term, localized surface emission of sea salt aerosols (marine cloud brightening, MCB) can mitigate the impacts of a predicted MHW without creating significant effects beyond the intervention zone. As a case study, we apply MCB to the 2019 Northeast Pacific MHW, "The [...]
A Formal Framework for Measuring Institutional Collapse under a Nuclear Winter Scenario
Published: 2026-09-16
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
A medium-scale regional nuclear exchange could plausibly loft ~16 Teragrams (16 * 10¹² grams, Tg) of soot into the stratosphere, sufficient to reduce conventional agricultural output past the ~30% threshold at which large-scale starvation emerges. Alternative food-production methods could restore sufficient caloric supply in the United States, but scaling them to ~70% of pre-shock capacity [...]
Deep seismo-volcanic tremors constrain the magma supply from the mantle
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Volcanology
Volcanic eruptions are driven by magma supplied from the mantle, yet deep magmatic flux remains poorly constrained. Here we propose to quantify it based on deep seismic tremors. We adopt a model of tremor generation by rapid growth of gas bubbles in response to magma decompression and establish a physical relationship between the cumulative seismic moment and the volume of the ascending magma. By [...]
Closure of Constraints in the Earth System: Planetary Biological Organisation Across Biogeochemical Cycles
Published: 2026-04-06
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Closure of constraints characterises the distinctive causal regime of biological systems: a set of constraints, each conserved with respect to the process it constrains and maintained by processes running at another scale, mutually dependent for their maintenance. The framework has been extended above the organism principally to ecosystems, where individuating the systems involved has proved [...]
Stolen Strata: Brick Kilns and the Loss of Karewa Tableland in Budgam, Kashmir,1993–2025, with a Correction to an Earlier Estimate
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Karewa tablelands are the flat-topped, scarp-bounded remnants of the old lake and river deposits of the Kashmir Valley. Reporting from Kashmir has said for years that they are being dug away for brick clay and fill, but I did not find a satellite measurement of how much, where and when. This study asks three questions: how much karewa tableland that was vegetated in 2013–2015 is no longer [...]
MUSE: virtual tide gauge reference estimates and error budgets for coastal index validation at ungauged coastlines
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography
Multi-dimensional coastal indices such as mangrove health indices aggregate tidal-range, mean higher-high water (MHHW), and tidal-anomaly sub-scores. Validating these sub-scores requires in situ tide gauges that low-data coastlines lack within 100 km. Global tide models such as EOT20 give accurate coastal tidal constituents but no tidal-anomaly metrics or per-source error terms for a [...]
Thermal Resilience During Prolonged Cooling Outages: A Multi-Zone Field Study of Disruption and Recovery in Arizona Apartments
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Engineering, Other Engineering
Increasing frequency and severity of extreme heat events, and growing dependence on air-conditioning systems emphasize the need to evaluate thermal resiliency of buildings during cooling outages. Existing assessments often emphasize isolated metrics or steady state conditions and may not adequately characterize cumulative thermal exposure, thermal buffering, and post outage recovery. This study [...]
Evaluating Bank Restoration and Stabilization in the Yellow River in Northern Indiana: Mitigation of Sediment and Nutrient Transport
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission, evaluated the effects of streambank remediation on the Yellow River in northwest Indiana. Two phases of remediation were completed on the Yellow River between 2021 and 2023, after assessments indicated it was a large contributor of sediment to the Kankakee River. Temporal [...]