Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Energy budget diagnosis of changing climate feedback
Published: 2022-11-15
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The climate feedback determines how Earth's climate responds to anthropogenic forcing. It has been more negative in recent decades than predicted by Earth system models due to a sea surface temperature `pattern effect', whereby warming is concentrated in the western tropical Pacific, where nonlocal radiative feedbacks are very negative. This phenomenon has however primarily been studied within [...]
Atmospheric carbon emissions from benthic trawling depend on water depth and ocean circulation
Published: 2022-10-28
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Through its vastness, resilience and biogeochemical complexity, the ocean offers humanity some of the largest potential natural pathways for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while avoiding new sources of anthropogenic emissions. In proposing a network of new marine protected areas in service of global ocean conservation, Sala et al. describe a potentially large climate benefit of such [...]
Global ocean dimethylsulfide photolysis rates quantified with a spectrally and vertically resolved model
Published: 2022-10-25
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Photochemical reactions initiated by ultraviolet (UV) radiation remove the climate-active gas dimethylsulfide (DMS) from the ocean’s surface layer. Here we quantified DMS photolysis using a satellite-based model that accounts for spectral irradiance attenuation in the water column, its absorption by chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM), and the apparent quantum yields (AQYs) with which [...]
Loop Current attenuation after the Mid-Pleistocene Transition contributes to Northern hemisphere cooling
Published: 2022-10-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The beginning of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) ~920 ka BP marked the expansion of northern hemisphere ice shields and caused a significant climate change in NW Europe. The MPT ended with the establishment of the 100 kyr ice age cyclicity at ~640 ka BP, due to orbital eccentricity changes. Previous studies explained the northern hemisphere cooling by cooling of sea-surface temperatures, [...]
Characteristics of Dust Storms Generated by Trapped Waves in the Lee of Mountains
Published: 2022-09-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Dust storms are ubiquitous in the Earth's atmosphere, yet the physical processes underlying dust emission and subsequent transport are not always understood, in-part due to the wide variety of meteorological processes that can generate high winds and dust. Here we use in-situ measurements and numerical modeling to demonstrate that vertically trapped atmospheric waves generated by air flowing over [...]
All aboard! Earth system investigations with the CH2O-CHOO TRAIN v1.0
Published: 2022-09-24
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Geochemistry, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Models of the carbon cycle and climate on geologic (>10^4 year) timescales have improved tremendously in the last 50 years due to parallel advances in our understanding of the Earth system and the increase in computing power to simulate its key processes. Despite these advances, balancing the Earth System's vast complexity with a model's computational expense is a primary challenge in model [...]
Marine Radiocarbon Calibration in Polar Regions: A Simple Approximate Approach using Marine20
Published: 2022-09-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Mathematics, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
The Marine20 radiocarbon (14C) age calibration curve, and all earlier marine radiocarbon calibration curves from the IntCal group, must be used extremely cautiously for the calibration of marine 14C samples from polar regions (outside ~ 40ºS – 40ºN) during glacial periods. Calibrating polar 14C marine samples from glacial periods against any Marine calibration curve (Marine20 or any earlier [...]
Ocean heat uptake efficiency increase since 1970
Published: 2022-09-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The ocean stores the bulk of anthropogenic heat in the Earth system. The ocean heat uptake efficiency (OHUE) -- the flux of heat into the ocean per degree of global warming -- is therefore a key factor in how much warming will occur in the coming decades. In climate models, OHUE is well-characterised, tending to decrease on centennial timescales; in contrast, OHUE is not well-constrained from [...]
Volcanic Lightning and Prebiotic Chemistry on the Early Earth
Published: 2022-09-16
Subjects: Chemistry, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Based on the paper by Pan et al., on the early Earth >4.2 Ga with limited exposed land areas, coupled with an ice covered ocean, lightning could have been rare. This presents a conundrum because lightning is considered to be an important energy source needed for the synthesis of prebiotic compounds required for the origin of life. Lightning occurrence during eruptions on wide spread volcanic [...]
PubDAS: a PUBlic Distributed Acoustic Sensing datasets repository for geosciences
Published: 2022-09-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
During the past few years, Distributing Acoustic Sensing (DAS) has become an invaluable tool for recording high-fidelity seismic wavefields with great spatiotemporal resolutions. However, the considerable amount of data generated during DAS experiments limits their distribution with the broader scientific community. Such a bottleneck inherently slows down the pursuit of new scientific discoveries [...]
Autonomous Passage Planning for a Polar Vessel
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sustainability
We introduce a method for long-distance maritime route planning in polar regions, taking into account complex changing environmental conditions. The method allows the construction of optimised routes, describing the three main stages of the process: discrete modelling of the environmental conditions using a non-uniform mesh, the construction of mesh-optimal paths, and path smoothing. In order to [...]
A review of coarse mineral dust in the Earth system
Published: 2022-08-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mineral dust particles suspended in the atmosphere span more than three orders of magnitude in diameter, from less than 0.1 µm to more than 100 µm. This wide size range makes dust a unique aerosol species with the ability to interact with many aspects of the Earth system, including radiation, clouds, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, and biogeochemistry. This review focuses on coarse and [...]
Rising hazard of storm surge is consistent with sea level trend and caused by intensification and widening of tropical cyclone in Japan
Published: 2022-08-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Risk Analysis
Variability in storminess, storm surge, and mean sea level (MSL) can substantially alter coastal hazards associated with extreme sea levels (ESL). However, detection and attribution of past changes in tropical cyclone (TC) and related storm surge activity are hampered by inhomogeneous TC records due to changes in observational capabilities. Here we investigate spatiotemporal changes in storm [...]
A Technical Overview of the North Carolina ECONet
Published: 2022-07-20
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Forest Management, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Plant Sciences
Regional weather networks–also referred to as mesonets–are imperative for filling in the spatial and temporal data gaps between nationally supported weather stations. The North Carolina Environment and Climate Observing Network (ECONet) fills this regional role; it is a mesoscale network of 44 (as of 2023) automated stations collecting 12 environmental variables every minute across North [...]
Distinct roles of cyclones and anticyclones in setting the midwinter minimum of the North Pacific eddy activity: a Lagrangian perspective
Published: 2022-06-27
Subjects: Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The North Pacific storm-track activity is suppressed substantially under the excessively strong westerlies to form a distinct minimum in midwinter, which seems inconsistent with linear baroclinic instability theory. This “midwinter minimum” of the storm-track activity has been intensively investigated for decades as a test case for storm-track dynamics. However, the mechanisms controlling it are [...]