Preprints
Search for science and technology (68 results)
Mitigating Methane in Jordan: National Inventory, Emission Projections, and Policy Pathways
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
BACKGROUND Jordan lacks a comprehensive national methane inventory integrating multi-sectoral sources, projections, and policy pathways. Despite methane’s outsized climate impact (28× CO2e over 100 years) and contribution to health-harming ozone, existing local studies focus narrowly on waste sector point sources, neglecting agriculture (19% of emissions) and energy (10%). This gap impedes [...]
Greywater Quantities and Qualities in Low-Income Kumasi, Ghana: Implications for Sustainable Water Management.
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Household greywater, comprising wastewater from laundry, kitchen, and bathroom activities, poses significant environmental and public health challenges in peri-urban communities with limited sanitation infrastructure. This study quantified and characterized greywater from 10 households in Kotei, a peri-urban community in Kumasi, Ghana, over a 10-week period in 2023. Using a cross-sectional [...]
Moist Convection and Radiative Cooling: Dynamical Response and Scaling
Published: 2025-06-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences
Moist convection is a fundamental process occurring in the Earth's atmosphere. It plays a central role in the weather and climate of the tropics where, to first order, the heating of the atmosphere by convection is in balance with the cooling of the atmosphere by the emission of radiation to outer space. In this study, we use a Cloud Resolving Model in Radiative-Convective Equilibrium with an [...]
Precursory Patterns, Evolution and Physical Interpretation of the 2025 Santorini-Amorgos Seismic Sequence
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The 2025 Santorini-Amorgos seismic sequence marked a significant episode of volcanic-seismic unrest in the Hellenic Volcanic Arc, offering a unique opportunity to investigate precursory patterns and the dynamic evolution of seismicity in a complex tectonic setting. Here, we analyze the preparatory phase of the crisis using a high-resolution relocated seismic catalog, anomaly detection, and [...]
Unsupervised Concept Discovery for Deep Weather Forecast Models with High-Resolution Radar Data
Published: 2025-05-01
Subjects: Computer Engineering
The global climate crisis is creating increasingly complex rainfall patterns, leading to a rising demand for data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) in short-term weather forecasting. However, the black-box nature of AI models act as a critical obstacle against their integration into existing forecasting operations. This study addresses this issue by implementing an explainable AI framework that [...]
Swiss data quality: augmenting CAMELS-CH with isotopes, water quality, agricultural and atmospheric chemistry data
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
In the era of large-sample hydrology (LSH) datasets, there is still limited availability of water quality data. Here, we introduce CAMELS-CH-Chem, an extension of CAMELS-CH (Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-sample Studies in Switzerland), incorporating up to 40 water quality parameters for 115 catchments across Switzerland. This new dataset spans the period 1981–2020 and allows for [...]
Application of automatic differentiation to the inversion of nonlinear mantle rheology using plate motion and topography
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The rheological properties of the mantle govern plate tectonics and mantle convection, yet constraining the rheological parameters remains a significant challenge. Laboratory experiments are usually performed under different temperature-pressure-strain-rate conditions than those of natural environments, leading to substantial uncertainties when extrapolating the parameters to real-world [...]
Topic: Mobility as Climate Change Adaptation in South Africa: Exploring the legal and policy significance of Artificial Intelligence.
Published: 2025-04-20
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The increasing reality of mobility linked to adverse impacts of climate change highlights an urgent need for nuanced and systematic research around climate mobility. While mobility is often used as a coping or adaptation strategy to escape climate impact, some mobility typifies and results in maladaptation. Protecting populations in vulnerable situations usually raises issues that test the limits [...]
A controlled release experiment for investigating methane measurement performance at landfills
Published: 2025-04-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences
We assessed the performance of various methane measurement solutions in landfill applications. Our study involved full-scale multipoint- and area-source (dispersed) controlled releases of methane from the ground surface of a closed 25-hectare landfill with collection system and a background rate of 24 kg/hr. Most quantification methods performed well, but the Mobile Tracer Correlation Emissions [...]
Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Poised to Rocket: Modeling the Environmental Impact of LEO Satellite Constellations
Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Physics
The proliferation of satellite megaconstellations in low Earth orbit (LEO) represents a significant advancement in global broadband connectivity. However, we urgently need to understand the potential environmental impacts, particularly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with these constellations. This study addresses a critical gap in modeling current and future GHG emissions by developing [...]
Enhancing the Normalized Difference Water Index for Improved Urban Flood Detection
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydrology, Natural Resource Economics, Other Earth Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Accurate urban flood detection is crucial for effective disaster management and urban planning. Traditional indices like the Normalized Difference Water Index and Modified Normalized Difference Water Index often produce inaccurate results due to spectral confusion in urban areas and sensitivity to shadows. Moreover, MNDWI's reliance on the Shortwave Infrared band limits its use with certain [...]
Interactive annular mode links jet stream-ocean coupling to decadal Northern Hemispheric warmth
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The atmospheric jet stream governs the distribution and intensity of midlatitude weather systems and climate variability. In the Northern Hemisphere, meridional migrations of the jet stream are directly linked to the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events. While previous studies have established that jet stream fluctuations are modulated by spatio-temporal variations in diabatic [...]
Petrographical evidence of the >1000 km voyage of a white pumice raft that arrived at the Ogasawara and Nansei Islands after the October 2023 earthquakes in the southern Izu Islands
Published: 2025-02-12
Subjects: Volcanology
An earthquake swarm occurred at Sofu Seamount near Izu-Torishima in the Izu-Ogasawara (Bonin) Arc, Japan, on 8 October 2023, followed by the arrival of unexpectedly-large tsunamis over a wide area of the Pacific coast of southwest Japan. On 20 October, aerial observation identified floating pumice rafts extending for ~80 km in the area the seamount, which were subsequently sampled and found to [...]
Can neighbourhood interventions strengthen collective climate action?
Published: 2025-01-09
Subjects: Environmental Studies
This paper builds on a model of individual and collective climate action on the neighbourhood level recently presented by Klöckner et al. [1]. In this model, types of local climate action were empirically categorized (diet, travel, protest, other climate actions) and it was found that both individual and collective intentions contribute to self-reported climate actions in these categories and [...]
Temporal variation in counterclockwise vertical-axis block rotations across a rift overlap zone, southwestern Ethiopia, East Africa
Published: 2024-12-18
Subjects: Tectonics and Structure
The southward propagation of the southern Main Ethiopian Rift (sMER) and the northward propagation of the Kenya Rift have generated the Broadly Rifted Zone (BRZ), a ~40-km-wide region of extensional overlap between the Chew Bahir Basin-Gofa Province and the sMER. However, the tectonic interaction between these propagating rifts is not well-understood. We present new paleomagnetic and [...]