Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Atmospheric Sciences
Air quality impacts of electricity purchase and air travel by organizations
Published: 2025-07-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences
Organizational climate actions often prioritize greenhouse gas reductions without considering other impacts such as improved air quality from reduced fossil fuel use. While air quality benefits of large-scale policies are well studied, those of organization-level activities are more uncertain. We quantify the impact of organizations' fossil fuel use from electricity purchasing and air travel on [...]
Impact of Spatially Continuous Urban Surface Properties on Heatwave Simulations: A Multi-City Analysis
Published: 2025-07-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences
Urban areas are unique in form and function, and representing them in process-based models requires prescribing facet-level morphological and radiative properties, among others. Most urban canopy models prescribe these by density class or local climate zone (LCZ), assigning identical values across broad regions or worldwide. However, properties can vary widely between and within cities. Global [...]
Navigating Rising Waters: Empowering Shunganunga Creek Floodplain Communities through Protection Motivation Theory
Published: 2025-07-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Studies, Meteorology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In communities like those near Topeka’s Shunganunga Creek, where flooding is a frequent and expected part of life, risk communication must adapt to meet the unique circumstances of residents. To understand how people in this floodplain perceive risk and respond to flood warnings, we interviewed 11 residents, guided by principles from Protection Motivation Theory. Participants, including long-time [...]
Multilingual Community Visualizations (MCV): A GIS Dashboard for Linguistic Research and NWS Operations
Published: 2025-07-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The NWS is actively expanding its multilingual outreach to better serve the 68.8 million U.S. individuals who speak a language other than English at home. Among these, 26.3 million individuals with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) are of particular concern, as they often rely entirely on translated forecasts to make life-saving decisions. Yet identifying where these populations are concentrated [...]
The Subseasonal North Atlantic Oscillation is a Quasi-Semiannual, Propagating Disturbance
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a well-studied mode of regional climate variability, associated with fluctuations in sea-level pressure (SLP), storm tracks, and the North Atlantic jet. These fluctuations have been perceived as a seesawing between two climatic phases, one corresponding to a more poleward jet and the other to a more equatorward. However, recent work has shown that zonal [...]
Satellite-based assessment of methane emissions from the Darvaza gas crater
Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH₄) is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and the gas-burning Darvaza crater in Turkmenistan is a rare and persistent emitter. There are substantial uncertainties regarding the date of the crater formation (assumed to be either in 1963 or 1971), the ignition of the fire, and the relation between the fire intensity and methane release. In this study, we reconstruct the fire history [...]
Deep Learning for Ionogram Parameter Extraction: A Time-Series Approach to Ionospheric Monitoring
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Ionograms provide a direct measurement of the ionosphere’s electron density profile and its irregularities. By examining critical frequencies researchers can identify key parameters—such as the F region critical frequency (foF2), the height of maximum electron density (hmF2), and the presence of Spread F irregularities—that are vital for understanding signal propagation, space weather effects, [...]
Moist Convection and Radiative Cooling: Dynamical Response and Scaling
Published: 2025-06-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences
Moist convection is a fundamental process occurring in the Earth's atmosphere. It plays a central role in the weather and climate of the tropics where, to first order, the heating of the atmosphere by convection is in balance with the cooling of the atmosphere by the emission of radiation to outer space. In this study, we use a Cloud Resolving Model in Radiative-Convective Equilibrium with an [...]
Validation and Metrics for Emissions Detection by Satellite
Published: 2025-05-31
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Detecting and quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from individual sites by satellite remote sensing has emerged as a powerful new method in recent years. As more and more players enter the field, based on a variety of technologies for both instrumentation and data processing, there is a need for standardized methods for evaluating the performance of these systems. This document is focused on the [...]
High-Resolution Methane Detection with the GHGSat Constellation
Published: 2025-05-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Monitoring
GHGSat operates a constellation of small satellites designed to detect and quantify methane emissions with high sensitivity compared with existing satellite technologies. An important feature of GHGSat measurements is the high spatial resolution (~25m), which enables attribution of emissions to specific facilities and subsequent corrective action from the operator. The GHGSat constellation [...]
Mapping the health harm of Bangladeshi brick kilns
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Bangladesh suffers from poor air quality, with brick kilns as major contributors that remain difficult to regulate. We combine remotely-sensed data, machine learning, and air-quality models to locate 9,187 clay brick kilns (2014–2024), estimating their technology, activity status, and health effects. Active kilns peaked in 2019 and have since declined by 4% annually. Kiln emissions cause [...]
Modeling Daily Plume Specific Smoke Concentrations for Health Effects Studies with Estimates of Fire Size, Plume Age, and Fuel Type
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Statistical Models, Transport Phenomena
Inhaling smoke PM2.5 can cause adverse health effects ranging from acute (e.g., lung irritation) to chronic (e.g., lung cancer). Acute health effects have immediate implications for public health, requiring rapid response to minimize harm during an exposure window. Estimating acute health effects requires short-term (e.g., daily) estimates of fire-specific smoke PM2.5 concentrations at ground [...]
Turbulent Snow Transport and Accumulation: New Reduced-Order Models and Diagnostics
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Dynamical Systems, Fluid Dynamics, Glaciology, Hydrology, Meteorology, Non-linear Dynamics
Understanding and modeling snow particle dynamics in the atmosphere remains a significant challenge for atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, and glaciologists. Temporally and spatially varying rates of snow transport, deposition, and erosion are driven by atmospheric turbulence and further complicated by inertial particle dynamics. Even with perfectly resolved wind fields, accurately predicting [...]
The Interplay of Vegetation and Land-Atmosphere Feedbacks in Flash Drought Prediction
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Monitoring
Flash droughts, known for their rapid onset and intensification, pose a significant threat to agriculture and water resources. The 2011 Texas flash drought, with its widespread agricultural losses exceeding $7.6 billion and severe ecological consequences, was a stark demonstration of their devastating impacts. This study investigates the crucial role of vegetation in numerical modeling of flash [...]
Human Intelligence Forming in the Rhythm of Solar Activity
Published: 2025-05-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biology, Earth Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Planetary Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This study relates to environmental biology and examines a possible link between atmospheric radiation ecology, modulated by space weather, and human cognitive development by analyzing correlations of solar activity phenomena with various indicators of intellectual potential. A novel metric, the Proton Flare Index (PFI), is introduced to quantify the influence of high-energy solar proton events [...]