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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-2769</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>NeuPlume: Probabilistic inversion of atmospheric point-source emissions from sparse observations</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Lei</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0004-9851-2895</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ma</surname>
<given-names>Xin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>School of Earth and Space Science and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>11</day>
<month>06</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>35</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Lei Wang</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2769/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2769/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2769/egusphere-2026-2769.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2769/egusphere-2026-2769.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Inverting point-source emissions from sparse atmospheric observations is difficult because emission rate, release height, wind speed, turbulence, and plume morphology can compensate for one another. We present NeuPlume, a neural-physical probabilistic inversion framework that returns an ensemble of data-compatible plume fields rather than a single point estimate. A Lagrangian stochastic model builds a scenario-specific forward library, a conditional neural field compresses the concentration fields, and a latent diffusion model learns the feasible field prior. During inversion, diffusion posterior sampling combines this prior with sparse observations to infer emission rate, effective release height, wind speed, turbulence intensity, and the full concentration field. The present implementation targets passive, low-height, near-neutral releases over flat terrain. Across six synthetic cases within this scope, NeuPlume achieves mean errors of 10.0% for emission rate and 1.4% for effective release height, outperforming Gaussian plume and mass-balance baselines under the same volumetric observation protocol. On 30 holdout cases, the nominal 68% credible interval attains 73.3% empirical coverage. As an illustrative field-transfer check, NeuPlume is applied to four UAV methane transects above a coal-mine ventilation shaft; known-U posterior intervals from three flights overlap the same-shaft hourly inventory, with diagnostics identifying wind-speed and height-boundary sensitivities under model mismatch. NeuPlume provides uncertainty-aware source-parameter constraints within the physical scope of its forward library and can be re-instantiated for other regimes by rebuilding the scenario-specific simulation ensemble and retraining the neural prior.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="35"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>U25D9004</award-id>
<award-id>42171464</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs2">
<funding-source>Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities</funding-source>
<award-id>ZNJC202415</award-id>
<award-id>2042026kf0075</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs3">
<funding-source>National Key Research and Development Program of China</funding-source>
<award-id>2024YFC3015600</award-id>
</award-group>
<award-group id="gs4">
<funding-source>Science and Technology Program of Hubei Province</funding-source>
<award-id>2025BEB017</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
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