Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Meteorology
Forward-Only Temporal-Coherence Occupancy Regimes in Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Intensity Evolution (1851–2024)
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rapid intensification (RI) remains one of the most consequential and difficult-to-characterize aspects of tropical cyclone intensity evolution, commonly defined as an increase in maximum sustained wind speed of at least 30 kt within 24 h (Kaplan and DeMaria 2003; Kaplan et al. 2010; DeMaria et al. 2021). This study asks whether Atlantic best-track intensity records contain forward-detectable [...]
Do Less Predictable Tropical Cyclones Induce Larger Damages?
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Hydrology, Meteorology, Statistical Models
Tropical cyclones (TCs) cause substantial disaster losses worldwide. Forecast skill for TC track and intensity has been improved by enhanced observations, high-resolution numerical models, advanced data assimilation methods, and applications of machine-learning methods. Yet these improvements have not consistently translated into reduced losses, in part because disaster outcomes depend on many [...]
The Response of Onset and Withdrawal of the Indian Summer Monsoon to Volcanic Aerosols
Published: 2026-03-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology
Large volcanic eruptions are a source of climate variability, affecting the seasonal mean precipitation of the Indian summer monsoon. However, the extent to which changes in seasonal precipitation can be attributed to variations in monsoon length vs. monsoon intensity has remained unclear. Using large ensemble simulations of idealised volcanic eruptions at varying latitudes, we find that the [...]
Visualizing Pyroclimotology
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Education, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
Background: Wildland fire activity often demonstrates distinct seasonality adhering to the alignment of climatologically favorable fuels, weather, and ignitions. Improved characterization of conditions that increase fire ignition probabilities, extreme fire behavior, and beneficial fire potential would enhance our understanding of fire regimes and provide insight for future wildland fire [...]
Quantifying the Causal Strength of Compound Drought–Heatwaves: Implications for Fire Events and Cropland Productivity
Published: 2026-02-21
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology
Compound drought and heatwave (CDHW) events represent one of the most disruptive forms of climate extremes, as the simultaneous occurrence of dry and hot conditions signifies their impacts far beyond those of individual events. Yet, despite their increasing significance, the causal influence of CDHW frequency and severity on fire activity and crop yield variability remains poorly quantified, [...]
Facilitating AI-Driven Sustainability: A Service-Oriented Ar-chitecture for Interoperable Environmental Data Access
Published: 2026-01-13
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology, Software Engineering, Sustainability
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly agentic AI, have created opportunities to enhance global sustainability by improving the efficiency and accuracy of environmental monitoring and response systems. Agentic AIs autonomously plan and execute towards specific goals with minimal or no human intervention; however, accessing environmental data is challenging and requires expertise, [...]
Evaluating the importance of street trees and their parameters for urban canopy model performance: Model updates and machine learning
Published: 2025-11-27
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology
In this study, the effects of street trees on the performance of an urban canopy model (UCM) and how the UCM sensitively responds to tree-related parameters compared with urban thermal parameters are examined. For this, a single-layer UCM is extended to represent street trees within urban canyons and multi-objective parameter optimizations and a global sensitivity analysis are conducted with the [...]
FEMA Phase-Out? Catastrophic Extremes Limit Decentralization of U.S. Flood Insurance
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Risk Analysis, Sustainability, Systems Engineering
The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) faces growing solvency and affordability challenges amid proposals to decentralize the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and shift disaster management to states. Catastrophic floods often span state boundaries, exposing multiple decentralized insurance pools simultaneously. Using a path-independent simulation framework that integrates [...]
Targeted weather regimes identify circulation patterns behind Western European summer heat extremes and trends
Published: 2025-11-12
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology
Western European heat extremes have intensified in recent decades, with their rate of warming outpacing the global mean. Against this general human-induced warming trend, understanding the circulation patterns that drive such heat extremes is crucial. Weather-regime (WR) approaches have been widely used to characterise large-scale circulation variability; however, conventional classifications are [...]
Probabilistic interpolation of crowdsourced meteorological data for higher-resolution gridded estimates of surface air temperature
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Statistical Models
Crowdsourced air temperature data from networks like Weather Underground offer dense spatial coverage and are increasingly used to study the canopy urban heat island (CUHI) effect. However, these observations are noisy: siting conditions, environmental interference, and sensor failures introduce spatially and temporally varying bias. This complicates interpolation, limiting our ability to [...]
A Comparative Evaluation of Advanced Urban Data Methods in WRF
Published: 2025-10-18
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Urban parameterization is critical for accurately simulating near-surface temperature and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in WRF. In this study, we compare three distinct approaches—W2W (a Python package integrating WUDAPT LCZ data), WRFUP (a Python package leveraging global high-resolution datasets), and a LiDAR-based parameterization—during the August, 2023 heatwave in Grenoble, France. Our [...]
Evaluating Urban Heat Adaptation Strategies for Extreme Heatwaves in Complex Terrain: A Case Study of Grenoble, France
Published: 2025-10-18
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Fluid Dynamics, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physics
Urban heat adaptation strategies are critical for mitigating the impacts of ex- treme heat events in cities, particularly as climate change exacerbates their intensity and frequency. This study evaluates a set of adaptation strategies during the 2023 heatwave in Grenoble, France, using the WRF model with the BEP+BEM urban canopy scheme. Eight scenarios are simulated, including increased [...]
Lorenz Energy Cycle Climatology for the Southwestern Atlantic Cyclones
Published: 2025-09-12
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology
This study presents a climatological assessment of the Lorenz Energy Cycle (LEC) applied to South Atlantic cyclones, using a Semi-Lagrangian framework. Over 6,700 cyclones were identified from ERA5 reanalysis (1979–2020), and LEC components were computed and averaged across four objectively defined life cycle phases: incipient, intensification, mature, and decay. Results reveal a coherent energy [...]
Reconciling remote sensing and reanalysis land surface temperatures: How surface conditions shape systematic differences between GOES-16 and MERRA-2 across the contiguous US
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Soil Science
Land surface temperature (LST) is a key variable governing land–atmosphere energy and water exchanges. Despite the importance of LST, satellite observations and reanalysis products often differ in how they define the effective LST depth and in the assumptions underlying their estimates, making comparisons and interpretation challenging. In this study, we present a detailed comparison of LST from [...]
Quantification of natural CO2 emissions from mofettes using a low-cost sensor network at the Starzach site in south-west Germany
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
We present a top-down method to derive carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from mofettes, using only point measurement time series at irregular locations. Notably, no wind vector information is needed, as gas transport is derived from cross-correlations between sensor stations and subsequently integrated using Gauss’ divergence theorem. The method is applied to an existing low-cost sensor network at [...]