Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
SWOT Data Assimilation with Correlated Error Reduction: Fitting Model and Error Together
Published: 2024-05-01
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission provides high-resolution two-dimensional sea surface height (SSH) data with swath coverage. However, spatially correlated errors affect these SSH measurements, particularly in the cross-track direction. The scales of errors can be similar to the scales of ocean features. Conventionally, instrumental errors and ocean signals have been [...]
Dynamics of Aggregates and Sinking Carbon Fluxes in a Turbulent Ocean
Published: 2024-04-23
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The ocean's biological pump, a critical component of the Earth's carbon cycle, transports organic matter from the surface ocean to depth, which is dominated by the sinking particles, often in the form of large (>1 mm) marine snow aggregates. Controls on carbon export are thought to be driven solely by ecological processes that produce and repackage sinking particles. Here, we present [...]
Pleistocene shifts in Great Basin hydroclimate seasonality govern the formation of lithium-rich paleolake deposits
Published: 2024-04-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Paleobiology, Sedimentology
Southwestern North America is currently experiencing a multidecadal megadrought, with severe consequences for water resources. However, significant uncertainty remains about how precipitation will change in the 21st century in this semi-arid region. Paleoclimatic records are essential for both contextualizing current change, and for helping constrain the sensitivity of regional hydroclimate to [...]
Estimating microphysical properties of ice clouds for climate modeling and remote sensing applications
Published: 2024-04-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ice clouds pose crucial challenges in climate model simulations and remote sensing retrievals due to complicated mechanisms of ice cloud formation that span from micro scale to planetary wave scale. Despite numerous attempts to parameterize these processes, many questions remain unanswered. This technical note provides a summary of the most common and recent studies on ice clouds and compiles [...]
Progress in Understanding North American Monsoon Using a Climate Model
Published: 2024-04-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The North American Monsoon is a seasonal shift in the large-scale circulation that supplies 60-80% of annual rainfall in northwestern Mexico and 30-40% in the US southwest. Regional climate models have shown that summer precipitation prediction over North America is the poorest in the Monsoon region. Most climate models do not account for a crucial mechanism of Monsoon: the boundary layer [...]
Sink of eddy energy by submesoscale sea surface temperature variability in a coupled regional model
Published: 2024-03-20
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Air-sea interaction impacts ocean energetics via modifications to the exchange of momentum and buoyancy. Prior work at the submesoscale has largely focused on mechanisms related to the eddy kinetic energy (EKE), such as the current feedback on stress, which generates negative wind work, or variations in sea surface temperature (SST) that modify surface winds. However, less is known about the [...]
Turbulence and mixing from neighbouring stratified shear layers
Published: 2024-03-13
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Studies of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) have typically modeled the initial mean flow as an isolated stratified shear layer. However, geophysical flows frequently exhibit multiple layers. As a step towards understanding these flows, we examine the case of two adjacent stratified shear layers {\color{black} using both linear stability analysis and direct numerical simulation}. With [...]
Linking local climate scenarios to global warming levels: Applicability, prospects and uncertainties
Published: 2024-03-09
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Global warming levels (GWLs) are increasingly becoming a central concept in climate change studies. In recent years, their integrative quality for climate change impact analysis has been demonstrated, and methodological advancements have helped to compensate for some inherent shortfalls of the concept. However, their applicability at the regional level is debatable, and no study to date has [...]
DINEOF Interpolation of Global Ocean Color Data: Error Analysis and Masking
Published: 2024-02-27
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The Data Interpolation Empirical Orthogonal Function (DINEOF) algorithm is used to reconstruct datasets of geophysical and biological variables such as sea surface temperature (SST) and Chlorophyll a (Chl a). In this study, we analyze the impact of both the quantity and distribution of missing data on the performance of DINEOF demonstrating how DINEOF plus a connectivity mask can be used for [...]
The effect of global and regional solar shading on climate: A simulation study
Published: 2024-02-23
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The potential climate impact of solar geoengineering is examined using climate model simulations by artificially reducing the incoming solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere. Climate scenario simulations indicate that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (2xCO2) induces a surface temperature rise which is amplified over the poles primarily during the respective winter. The warming also [...]
The Potential for Fuel Reduction to Offset Climate Warming Impacts on Wildfire Intensity in California
Published: 2024-02-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Statistics and Probability, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Increasing fuel aridity due to climate warming has and will continue to increase wildfire danger in California. In addition to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, one of the primary proposals for counteracting this increase in wildfire danger is a widespread expansion of hazardous fuel reductions. Here, we quantify the potential for fuel reduction to reduce wildfire intensity using [...]
Bad science and good intentions prevent effective climate action
Published: 2024-02-17
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Although the 2015 Paris Agreement climate targets seem certain to be missed, only a few experts are questioning the adequacy of the current approach to limiting climate change and suggesting that additional approaches are needed to avoid unacceptable catastrophes. This article posits that selective science communication and unrealistically optimistic assumptions are obscuring the reality that [...]
Seasonality of spectral radiative fluxes and optical properties of Arctic sea ice during the spring-summer transition
Published: 2024-02-16
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The reflection, absorption, and transmittance of solar (shortwave) radiation by sea ice play a crucial role in physical and biological processes in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean and atmosphere. These sea ice optical properties are of great importance, in particular during the melt season, as they significantly impact energy fluxes within and the total energy budget of the coupled [...]
Increase in insurance losses caused by North Atlantic hurricanes in a warmer climate
Published: 2024-02-08
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
North Atlantic hurricanes are a major driver of property losses in the United States and a critical peril for the reinsurance industry globally. We leverage insurance loss data and stochastic modeling to investigate the impacts of projected changes in hurricane climatology on the insurance industry, for +2 °C and +4 °C warming scenarios. We find that, relative to the historical baseline [...]
A physical demonstration of the increase in global surface energy due to increasing P[CO2]
Published: 2024-02-01
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Although study of the effect of energy-absorbing gases in our atmosphere has a two-hundred year history and an unequivocal explanation based on scientific observation and theory, a significant fraction of the public and even a few scientists doubt the correlation between the increasing the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide (P[CO2]) and the observed increase in terrestrial temperature [...]