Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
A new method to study inhomogeneities in climate records: Brownian Motion or Random Deviations?
Published: 2019-05-08
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Sciences
Climate data is affected by inhomogeneities due to historical changes in the way the measurements were performed. Understanding these inhomogeneities is important for accurate estimates of long-term changes in the climate. These inhomogeneities are typically characterized by the number of breaks and the size of the jumps or the variance of the break signal, but a full characterization of the [...]
Trends of hydroclimatic intensity in Colombia
Published: 2019-05-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management
Prediction of changes in precipitation in upcoming years and decades caused by global climate change associated with the greenhouse effect, deforestation and other anthropic perturbations is a practical and scientific problem of high complexity and huge consequences. To advance toward this challenge we look at the daily historical record of all available rain gauges in Colombia to estimate an [...]
Reduction of spatially structured errors in wide-swath altimetric satellite data using data assimilation
Published: 2019-05-07
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is a next generation satellite mission expected to provide a 2km-resolution observation of the sea surface height (SSH) on a two-dimensional swath. Processing SWOT data will be challenging, because of the large amount of data, the mismatch between high spatial resolution and low temporal resolution, and the observation errors. The present [...]
The Incredible Lightness of Water Vapor
Published: 2019-04-24
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The molar mass of water vapor is significantly less than that of dry air. This makes a moist parcel lighter than a dry parcel of the same temperature and pressure. This effect is referred to as the vapor buoyancy effect and has often been overlooked in climate studies. We propose that this effect increases Earths outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) and stabilizes Earths climate. We illustrate this [...]
The El Niño – La Niña cycle and recent trends in supply and demand of net primary productivity in African drylands
Published: 2019-04-24
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The role of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the balance between supply and demand of net primary productivity (NPP) over Africa is unclear. Here, we analyze the impact of ENSO on this balance in a spatially explicit framework using gridded population data from the WorldPop project, satellite-derived data on NPP supply, and statistical data from the United Nations. Our analyses demonstrate [...]
The flow of fresh groundwater and solutes to the world’s oceans and coastal ecosystems
Published: 2019-03-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The flow of fresh groundwater towards the world oceans may provide substantial inputs of nutrients and solutes to the oceans. Here we present a spatially resolved global model of coastal groundwater discharge to show that the contribution of fresh groundwater is lower than most previous estimates and accounts for only ~0.6% of the freshwater input and ~2% of the solute input to the oceans. [...]
Preprint: Dataset of global extreme climatic indices due to an acceleration of ice sheet melting during the 21st century
Published: 2019-03-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Sciences
This article describes extreme indices maps (Data Cube, raster X Time) for different scenarios with a more important contribution to the sea level rise from Greenland and/or Antarctica during the 21st century under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 emission scenario. The indices are produced annually and globally with a resolution of 0.5°X0.5° from 1951 to 2099. The data were [...]
The Impact of Melting Ice Sheets on Future Global Climate
Published: 2019-03-22
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
That is a preprint of an article suubmitted at Applied Greography (20tf of March 19). Climate change studies in the last decades have been based on Global Climate Models (GCM), and the distribution of climatic regions over time extracted from these models can be represented using the Köppen climatic classification. The Köppen approach predicts the distribution of biomes worldwide on the basis of [...]
Half the worlds population already experiences years 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial
Published: 2019-03-12
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Paris Agreement aims to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5 °C above preindustrial. A natural question for the public to ask is “But how much warmer than preindustrial is where I live?” We develop a pattern-scaling technique to present local annually-resolved, gridded temperature anomalies prior to the industrial burning of fossil fuels. On average the past 5 years, [...]
New flow relaxation mechanism explains scour fields at the end of submarine channels
Published: 2019-03-11
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
In the ocean, particle-laden gravity flows, turbidity currents, flow in river-like channels across the ocean floor. These submarine channels funnel sediment, nutrients, pollutants and organic carbon into the ocean basins and can extend over 1,000’s of kilometers. At the end of these channels, turbidity currents lose their confinement, decelerate and deposit their sediment load. This is what we [...]
Technical note on the multi-GNSS, multi-frequency and near real-time ionospheric TEC monitoring system for South America
Published: 2019-02-21
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Development of regional services able to provide ionospheric total electron content (TEC) maps with a high spatial resolution, and in near real-time, are of high importance for applications and the research community. We provide here the methodologies, and a preliminary assessment, of such a system. The system relies on the public Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) infrastructure in [...]
Reconstruction of Cloud Vertical Structure with a Generative Adversarial Network
Published: 2019-02-19
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Computer Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We demonstrate the feasibility of solving atmospheric remote sensing problems with machine learning using conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs), implemented using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We apply the CGAN to generating two-dimensional cloud vertical structures that would be observed by the CloudSat satellite-based radar, using only the collocated Moderate-Resolution [...]
Heavy rainfall in Paraguay during the 2015-2016 austral summer: causes and sub-seasonal-to-seasonal predictive skill
Published: 2019-02-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
During the austral summer 2015/16, severe flooding displaced over 170 000 people on the Paraguay River system in Paraguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil. These floods were driven by repeated heavy rainfall events in the lower Paraguay River basin. Alternating sequences of enhanced moisture inflow from the South American low-level jet and local convergence associated with baroclinic systems were [...]
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a major source of uncertainty in projections of population-weighted surface temperature under climate change.
Published: 2019-02-06
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Rising global mean temperatures and an increase in the fraction of the population living in urban areas is leading to a number of grand challenges. Contrasting area-weighted and population-weighted trends in an ensemble of CMIP5 climate model simulations under a range of climate and population change scenarios (RCPs and SSPs) shows that population-weighted changes in future surface temperature [...]
Factor Analysis by R Programming to Assess Variability Among Environmental Determinants of the Mariana Trench
Published: 2019-01-28
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Education, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Geography, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Programming Languages and Compilers, Remote Sensing, Science and Mathematics Education, Sedimentology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science, Tectonics and Structure, Water Resource Management
The aim of this work is to identify main impact factors affecting variations in the geomorphology of the Mariana Trench which is the deepest place of the Earth, located in the west Pacific Ocean: steepness angle and structure of the sediment compression. The Mariana Trench presents a complex ecosystem with highly interconnected factors: geology (sediment thickness and tectonics including four [...]