Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Intensifying salinity intrusion in the Barataria Basin, 2010 to 2026: a coastward gradient in the rate of change
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The Barataria Basin, a shallow microtidal estuary in coastal Louisiana, has lost a substantial part of its wetland area and is exposed to increasing salinity intrusion as the Mississippi River remains leveed and relative sea level rises. Salinity conditions in this basin have been described, but whether the rate at which salinity changes varies spatially across the basin has not yet been [...]
Changes to the Madden-Julian Oscillation with Surface Temperature Warming in Aquaplanet Simulations
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Interactions between waves and the mean-state in the tropics are of fundamental importance for reliable future projection of tropical waves and their impacts under anthropogenic climate change. The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the dominant source of weather variability over many parts of the globe on intraseasonal timescales. In this study, we investigate the influence of mean-state changes [...]
Encouraging Wildfire Mitigation Action Via National Weather Service Fire Weather Products
Published: 2026-09-23
Subjects: Geography, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
Wildfire mitigation actions intend to reduce the probability and consequences (risk) of wildfire to critical assets by protecting the life and property of the public and emergency responders during and after a wildfire event. Given mitigation activities span a continuum of timescales from minutes to years and multiple orders-of-magnitude in terms of costs, an opportunity exists to encourage [...]
Characterizing and Predicting Change in the Global Ocean Biosphere: A Four-Dimensional Observing Strategy for the 2028–2037 Decadal Survey
Published: 2026-09-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Ocean ecosystems constitute the largest habitable volume on Earth and regulate climate, support fisheries and a global Blue Economy valued at an estimated $1.5 trillion annually and provide services on which human wellbeing depends. Four decades of satellite ocean color observations have transformed understanding of phytoplankton distribution, biodiversity, and productivity, and NASA's PACE [...]
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: 2026-09-18
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: 2026-09-16
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: 2026-09-08
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: 2026-09-07
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
Satellite observations make it easy to compare air pollution in countries that adopted a policy with countries that did not. This paper examines what such a comparison identifies. It uses Sentinel-5P TROPOMI tropospheric NO₂ for 2019–2024 and a country-level difference-in-differences (DiD) model of the European Climate Law that compares the EU-27 with nine neighbouring non-EU countries. NO₂ fell [...]
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: 2026-09-05
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: 2026-08-30
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 [...]