Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Settling-driven Rayleigh–Taylor instability in a pre-existing turbulent field
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Fluid Dynamics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Vertical particle transport controls environmental processes ranging from sediment deposition and the export of organic material and microplastics to the fate of minerals released for carbon dioxide removal. When a particle-laden layer overlies denser water, particles destabilize the interface and descend collectively as convective plumes, far faster than individual settling. Yet this mechanism [...]
The discovery of moderate non-linear surprises in CMIP6 models
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
This study presents an automated algorithm for detecting Moderate Non-linear Surprises (MNS) in the outputs of climate models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), building upon and relaxing existing methodologies for detection of critical transitions in climate models. The approach combines four statistical criteria — standard deviation, maximum 10-year [...]
Paraglider flight logs as hypsometers: daily temperature profiles of an Alpine valley, its diurnal heating, and the nearly level ceiling of thermals
Published: 2026-10-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
A paraglider flight recorder stores both pressure and GNSS altitude: together they turn routine flight logs into hypsometric measurements of layer-mean virtual temperature. From 86 369 IGC logs of the Valais, Swiss Alps, quality screening retains 13 520 dedicated-instrument flights on 437 days in 2011–2026; 392 days provide at least one profile layer supported by ten flights. At midday, between [...]
Paragliders as probes of the Alpine boundary layer: sink polars from 86 000 flight logs and the flow field of a valley
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Paraglider flight logs are a dense, free and continuous record of the air over mountains: every thermal day, hundreds of pilots fly for hours along the slopes and across the valleys and record their vertical speed once per second. The obstacle is that a vario measures the air plus the sink of the glider, and the sink polars of paragliders are unknown. We obtain them from the logs themselves. [...]
Linking Hemispheric Warming Asymmetry to Anthropogenic Waste Heat
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
This paper proposes a potential link between the observed hemispheric warming asymmetry and the distribution of population and per capita energy consumption. Nearly 87% of the world’s population resides in the northern hemisphere, where per capita energy consumption has also been substantially higher than in the southern hemisphere. Consequently, anthropogenic waste heat discharged into the [...]
Contrasting elevation-dependent warming and snowfall changes in the Karakoram and Central Himalaya
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
High Mountain Asia shows strong regional differences in climate and glacier change, yet how future warming and precipitation responses vary with elevation remains unclear. Here, we examine elevation-dependent changes in near-surface temperature, snowfall fraction, snowfall amount and rain–snow transition elevations across glacier-containing grid cells of the Karakoram–Himalaya. We analyse a [...]
Three gaps for foundation models to address in satellite remote sensing of inland waters
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Long-term Earth observation of inland waters depends on continuity between satellite missions, adequate combinations of spectral, spatial and temporal resolution, and representative calibration and validation datasets. Discontinuities and trade-offs in these components constrain the records available for studying inland waters and their change. We examine three gaps affecting inland water remote [...]
Improvement of Daily Temperature Forecasts from a Prediction Market
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology, Natural Resource Economics, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Prediction markets aggregate and distill the collective views of participants who have a financial stake in being correct. They have been shown to produce more accurate forecasts in realms like election results, which are not easily amenable to mechanistic modeling because they entail forecasting human behavior. It is far less clear that prediction markets should improve the accuracy of [...]
Assessment of adjacency effect correction methods for Sentinel-2 MSI observations over mid-latitude lakes
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate retrieval of remote-sensing reflectance (Rrs) from lakes requires separating water-leaving radiance from atmospheric, surface and adjacency contributions. We assessed adjacency effect correction (AEC) methods for Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) imagery using 329 satellite--insitu matchups from four mid-latitude lakes: Greifensee, Lake Geneva, Lake Garda and Lake Trasimeno. The [...]
On the pattern, magnitude, and timing of anthropogenic heat uptake in the Southern Ocean
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Most of the anthropogenic heat absorbed by the ocean enters through the Southern Ocean, yet the processes that set the pattern, magnitude, and timing of this uptake remain unclear. Using a climate model (CESM1) under abrupt 4xCO2, we show that uptake by the preindustrial ocean circulation alone accounts for more than half of the Southern Ocean uptake and reproduces its slow decline. We isolate [...]
Forecasting the moisture content of live forest fuels with a transformer machine learning model and Sentinel-2 satellite data
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Live fuel moisture content (LFMC) provides an indicator of vegetation flammability, the potential for canopy dieback from drought, and habitat quality for arboreal fauna. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have increased the potential in meteorological forecasts for Earth surface forecasting. Combining weather forecasts with remotely sensed LFMC offers a promising avenue for short and [...]
Three thresholds and a computer-assisted phase diagram for the spectral stability of periodic hydroelastic Whitham waves
Published: 2026-09-26
Subjects: Glaciology, Non-linear Dynamics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Partial Differential Equations
We study the spectral stability of 2π-periodic travelling waves of the hydroelastic Whitham equation, a scalar model with the full linear dispersion relation of water waves under a thin elastic sheet (e.g. a floating ice cover), as a function of the flexural rigidity T. Besides the modulational cluster at the origin, the zero-amplitude spectrum has, on an interval of T, a collision of opposite [...]
Interface Habitats: An Integrated Observing Strategy for Earth’s Most Dynamic and Consequential Aquatic Boundaries
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
One line, no hard line breaks — safe to copy and paste: Interface Habitats – the dynamic boundaries where water meets land, the seafloor, the atmosphere, and ice, and where fronts, eddies, and filaments draw comparably sharp boundaries within the water itself – are among Earth's most productive, diverse, and rapidly changing ecosystems, and the site of most human interaction with aquatic [...]
Transient Events: A Rapid-Response, Multi-Platform Observing Strategy for Detecting and Understanding Abrupt Change in Aquatic Ecosystems
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Extremes, not average conditions, increasingly govern the state of aquatic ecosystems and the risks they carry for people. Events far outside normal variability can reshape ecosystem structure and function within hours to weeks, and both the observational record and climate projections indicate such extremes are growing more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting. Whether an extreme becomes a [...]
Carbon and the Elements of Life: Integrated Observing and Modeling of Marine Biological Carbon Cycles
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Biology, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The global ocean acts as a massive reservoir for carbon dioxide, establishing ocean biogeochemistry as a primary driver of global carbon distributions [1-3]. This dynamic system is mediated by living organisms that cycle carbon and other elements through the ocean interior and air-sea interface, and is already being altered by warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and shifting nutrient supply [...]