Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Variance-ranked sound speed bases misclassify the surface duct: limits of profile RMSE as a proxy for acoustic prediction skill in the Bay of Bengal
Published: 2026-09-17
Subjects: Geography, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sound speed profile (SSP) estimation from surface observables is operationally mature and is evaluated almost universally by profile root-mean-square error. Using 19,934 Argo profiles from the Bay of Bengal (2005–2020), season-stratified empirical orthogonal function (EOF) bases, and BELLHOP transmission loss (TL) at 500 Hz, 1500 Hz and 3500 Hz over 24 held-out locations, we show that this metric [...]
Efficient measurement of marine sedimentary porewater pH and oxygen concentrations using optical sensors
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Porewater oxygen concentrations and pH exert substantial influence on sediment diagenesis and potentially towards the reliability of palaeoceanographic records. However, these fundamental chemical parameters are not systematically measured during sea-going expeditions. This study presents an easy, inexpensive and effective method to measure marine sediment porewater oxygen and pH levels using [...]
Dendrochronology and the date of the Thera volcanic eruption
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology, Volcanology
The main disciplines that contribute to our understanding of the chronology of the ancient Near East are history, archaeology, and various scientific dating techniques including dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, and ice-core analysis. Beginning in the 1980s, a major rift began to develop between the historical-archaeological chronology and that based on dendrochronology-calibrated radiocarbon [...]
Recent armed conflict disrupts atmospheric climate monitoring
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The unprecedented use of GPS jamming in the Russo-Ukrainian war severely disrupts GNSS Radio Occultation, a key remote sensing technique for climate monitoring and weather forecasting. Since 2018, a growing systematic gap in atmospheric observations has extended far beyond the direct conflict zone. This loss of data substantially impairs atmospheric temperature monitoring, introducing observation [...]
A Changing North Atlantic Background Amplifies Western European Heatwaves
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Western European summer heatwaves have increased markedly since the 1990s, culminating in the record warmth of May–July 2026 since 1950. We show that this rise is closely associated with the slowly evolving North Atlantic background. We combine two leading April sea surface temperature modes, representing basin-wide warming and a tripole-like pattern, into an Atlantic Two-Mode Index (ATMI). The [...]
Independent Verification of the European Climate Law's Effect on Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution: A Satellite-Derived, Difference-in-Differences Analysis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Testing the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) against a deliberately constructed external control group of nine non-EU countries (the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia), using a two-group Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model with country-clustered standard errors on a 36-country panel, produces [...]
The Vulnerability Spiral: Compound Climate Risk Across Five Islands
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, International and Area Studies, Marine Biology, Natural Resource Economics, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Sustainability
sea level rise stacked on top of degrading natural coastal defenses. That assumption is rarely tested againstindependent, multi temporal evidence, and rarely broken down by ecosystem type, so I tested it directly,across 5 islands spanning 3 ocean basins (Maldives, Lakshadweep, [...]
A multicriteria decision analysis framework for generating baseline virtual weather stations in Zimbabwe
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
In this study, we generate baseline Virtual Weather Stations (VWS) in locations with minimal atmospheric noise by avoiding two major surface factors known to cause noise in remotely sensed weather observations. The study also proposes an improvement to the spatial coverage of Zimbabwe's weather observation network through the identification of environmentally suitable locations for virtual [...]
ENSO, weather regimes, and U.S. heating degree days
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Heating degree days (HDDs; the number of degrees by which average daily temperature falls below 65°F) quantify heating demand and are used to manage weather-related financial risk. Here we examined the relation of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with U.S. cold-season HDDs over the period 1979–2026 in NOAA Climate Division data and observations from stations that are used to settle publicly [...]
Super El Niño Winters and the Arctic Polar Vortex: Response Heterogeneity, QBO Modulation, and a Prospectively Defined Test for Winter 2026/27
Published: 2026-08-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In the three strongest El Niño winters of the instrumental record (1982/83, 1997/98, 2015/16) the Arctic polar vortex did not collapse in a major midwinter sudden stratospheric warming (SSW). This study starts from the premise that the observation is not a paradox: 58% of El Niño winters contain at least one major SSW, so the chance probability of three consecutive SSW-free winters is 0.42³≈0.07, [...]
Deep Learning-Based Meteorological Data Downscaling: A Comparative Study with Physics Informed CNN and a Component-Level Ablation Analysis
Published: 2026-08-29
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Meteorological statistical downscaling is a critical technique for deriving high-resolution climate information from coarse global reanalysis products. This experiment investigates the application of five representative deep learning architectures for downscaling ERA5 reanalysis 2m temperature fields from 1° to 0.25° spatial resolution (4x upscaling factor) over the China region, spanning the [...]
A Reduced-Order Dynamical Model for the Ignition of Diver-Induced Cohesive Silt-Out on Sloping Beds
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Dynamical Systems, Dynamic Systems, Non-linear Dynamics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A downward fin thrust near a cohesive seabed lofts sediment. Whether this cloud settles or organizes into a self-sustaining down-slope current determines if a diver loses visibility briefly or catastrophically. We reduce the layer-averaged balances of fluid mass, sediment mass, and momentum to a temporal slab of fixed thickness in the weakly entraining limit. This yields an autonomous planar [...]
Quantifying onset period rather than single date reveals projected intensification of dry-to-wet season transition.
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Recent years have seen increasingly frequent delayed rainfall onset, especially in South America (SAm) and Southern Africa (SAfr). This arrival of the wet season is critical to water resources, ecosystems, and rain-fed agriculture. Existing rainfall-based approaches define the rainfall onset by a single date, limiting their ability to characterise the progression into the wet season. We introduce [...]
RainCheck Africa: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Gridded Precipitation Dataset Performance at Continental Scale
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Gridded rainfall products are indispensable for water resource management, agricultural monitoring, and disaster risk reduction across Africa, yet no systematic synthesis of their performance has been conducted. We present RainCheck Africa: a PRISMA-compliant systematic review and meta-analysis of 72 peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2025 evaluating satellite, reanalysis, and [...]
Numerical modeling and hazard analysis of Kuwait dust storm events using WRF Chemistry model
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Dust storms have a negative impact on socio-economic events in Kuwait, including traffic accidents, seaport closures, airport shutdowns, and flight delays, and agriculture degradation. From the diurnal analysis of weather parameters, it was noticed that dust storms were more severe from noon to late evening hours and gradually slowed down during the night hours. Sometimes, these strong dust [...]