Preprints
There are 8003 Preprints listed.
How Rural Is Rural? Agreement Between the FARS Rural/Urban Label and 2020 Census Urban Areas for U.S. Traffic Deaths, 2015–2024
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Spatial Science, Transportation Engineering
U.S. rural road safety statistics, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s annual rural/urban fatality reports, classify each fatal crash by the rural/urban variable (RUR_URB) in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Population research, in contrast, usually defines rural with the Census Bureau’s urban areas. We measure how well the two definitions agree for every [...]
Satellite Quantification of Methane Emissions from Individual Countries in Southeast Asia: Roles of Dry and Wet Seasons
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Southeast Asia is a global methane (CH4) hotspot, yet its emissions remain highly uncertain particularly regarding seasonal variability. Here we quantify methane emissions over ten Southeast Asian countries using TROPOMI satellite observations and analytical inversions at up to 0.25°×0.3125° resolution (~25km×25km), separately for the dry (October 2021-April 2022) and wet (May-September 2022) [...]
Late Paleocene leaf macroflora from a destroyed outcrop of the Marcelina Formation, Paso Diablo Mine, Venezuela: a rescue record
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Other Plant Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
In 2016, a production blast at a mining face of the Paso Diablo Mine (Guasare Basin, northwestern Venezuela) exposed a level rich in fossil leaves of the Marcelina Formation (late Paleocene), located between coal seams 4O and 4M. The material was removed as overburden by a mining shovel a few hours after it was documented. We present the first published record of leaf macroflora from this [...]
Seasonal hydropower forecast framework using a combination of deep learning and physics-based methods
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Engineering
Seasonal hydropower forecasts can inform power-system resource adequacy, but uncertainty propagates through climate, hydrologic, routing, water-management, and generation components.We develop a regional planning prototype linking North American Multi-Model Ensemble seasonal forecasts, Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) downscaling, an uncertainty-aware long short-term memory runoff model based on [...]
Role of Reforestation in Reducing Landslide Risk in Galyat, Pakistan: A Remote Sensing and GIS-Based Temporal Analysis (2011–2025)
Published: 2026-11-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Landslides are among the most common natural hazards in mountainous regions, often resulting in loss of life, damage to infrastructure, and destruction of agricultural land. Forest cover plays an important role in slope stabilization, soil erosion control, and landslide-risk reduction; however, empirical evidence regarding this relationship in specific mountainous landscapes remains limited. This [...]
Prospectivity model for magmatic Nickel, Copper, Cobalt, and Platinum-Group Elements in the Midcontinent Rift
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Volcanology
Much of the Midcontinent Rift is concealed beneath glacial sediment, which limits direct geological observation and makes it difficult to evaluate the potential for undiscovered magmatic Ni–Cu–PGE deposits with publicly available data. The 1.1 Ga rift hosts the Eagle Ni–Cu–PGE deposit of northern Michigan, one of the few domestic sources of nickel, a critical mineral of the United States. We [...]
Constraining Lithospheric Delamination on Venus with Flexural Topography and Trench Geometry
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rollback-style lithospheric recycling has been proposed for a subset of Venusian coronae and other tectonic features based on the presence of trench-outer-rise systems, but the mechanism and conditions required to initiate recycling remain poorly understood. Peel-back delamination (PBD) is a proposed mechanism in which dense lithospheric mantle decouples and peels away from a thin layer of [...]
Spatiotemporal Variability of Aerosols over Ghana: Changes Associated with the COVID-19 Period
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Environmental Sciences
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a leading environmental health risk in West Africa, yet long-term characterization of aerosol variability in Ghana is constrained by sparse surface monitoring. Here we combine aerosol optical depth (AOD) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra and Aqua satellites (2010-2022), the daily, 1 km2 Gridded Africa Surface [...]