Preprints
Search for science and technology (76 results)
Rethinking livestock futures: Integrating climate impacts and genomic technologies into global food security models
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
With the projected increase in the global population and food demand on a planet in climate crisis, the debate about the role of livestock continues to intensify. Animals farmed for food are both a victim and a contributor of climate change (CC), with animals suffering from heat stress due to CC but also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Livestock studies have demonstrated [...]
Strike-slip restraining screwed fault geometry reconstructed from the 2025 Myanmar earthquake
Published: 2025-08-24
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a fault surface model of the 2025 Mw 7.7 Myanmar earthquake based on the potency density tensor inversion (PDTI) of teleseismic P-waves combined with surface reconstruction from distributed potency tensor solutions. Our source model demonstrates that the earthquake fault is twisted, varying the dip angle along strike. Inferred fault twists are prominent near fault-segment junctions, [...]
Decadal Trends in Seasonal Climatic Variables in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: A Non-Parametric Approach Using the Mann-Kendall Test
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Background: Coastal cities like Dar es Salaam face an increasing vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate variability, including urban flooding, heat stress, and altered water availability. Examining the temporal evolution of key climatic variables is critical to informing adaptive strategies and promoting sustainable urban development. Methods: Decadal seasonal trends in rainfall, daytime [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
High-ambition climate action in all sectors can achieve a 59% greenhouse gas emissions reduction in Korea by 2035
Published: 2025-08-13
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Under the Paris Agreement’s ratchet mechanism, countries are expected to enhance their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), including new targets for 2035. For Korea, one of the world’s largest CO2 emitters, the challenge is to strengthen its existing policy framework to not only ensure the achievement of its 2030 NDC but also support a more ambitious 2035 pathway. This study employs an [...]
Carbon removal trading can promote economic growth in the Global South but could undermine food and energy security
Published: 2025-07-06
Subjects: Engineering
A fundamental mismatch between countries’ carbon dioxide removal (CDR) responsibilities and their domestic capacities to fulfil them poses a major challenge to achieving the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal. Interregional CDR trade offers a solution, yet there has been no quantitative assessment of how such trade could reshape the economies of exporting regions and impact their [...]
Separate sectoral decarbonization policies accelerate climate action but could jeopardize key sustainability targets
Published: 2025-06-15
Subjects: Engineering
The Paris Agreement grants countries flexibility in designing their pathways to net-zero emissions, yet most have focused on economy-wide, cost-effective approaches without clearly defining the role of sectoral emission reductions and/or carbon dioxide removal (CDR). These blanket strategies prioritize low-cost sectors, leaving significant residual emissions and relying on uncertain, largely [...]
Mitigating Methane in Jordan: National Inventory, Emission Projections, and Policy Pathways
Published: 2025-06-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Jordan currently lacks a comprehensive national methane inventory with uncertainty analysisthat integrates multi-sectoral sources, future projections, and mitigation pathways. This study develops Jordan’s national methane inventory and assesses emission trajectories and mitigation potential through 2050. Methane emissions from the energy, transport, agriculture, solid waste and wastewater sectors [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. A measurement solution is defined as a system or market offering that quantifies and/or localizes emissions. 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 [...]
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: 2025-02-11
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 [...]