Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Atmospheric Sciences
Spatio-Temporal Assessment of Atmospheric Pollutants and Dispersion Mechanisms over West Bengal (2019–2024): Insights from Sentinel-5P, GEOS-CHEM, and HYSPLIT Models
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology
This study delivers a thorough spatio-temporal analysis of atmospheric pollutants and their dispersion mechanisms across West Bengal (2019–2024), utilizing an integrated approach of Earth Observation and modeling techniques. We employed satellite data from Sentinel-5P alongside GEOS-Chem box modeling, HYSPLIT trajectory simulations, and AI-enhanced statistical methods to examine trends, identify [...]
Historical air quality database in Navarre, Spain (2011–2025): Harmonized hourly records and relational Star Schema of atmospheric pollutants
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Monitoring
Administrative air quality monitoring networks often release public data across fragmented repositories, variable formats, and inconsistent time encodings, hindering automated scientific re-use. This paper presents a curated, harmonized, and quality-controlled environmental dataset covering 15 consecutive years (2011–2025) of hourly atmospheric observations in Navarre, Spain. Integrating [...]
Hotspots of Efficient Large-scale Circulation Response to Idealized Diabatic Heating
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Soil moisture anomalies can influence large-scale atmospheric circulation and thereby affect remote regions. However, the seasonal and geographical dependence of these circulation responses has been largely unexplored. Here, we conduct idealized experiments with a Linear Baroclinic Model, imposing identical low-level diabatic heating anomalies across global land to examine atmospheric circulation [...]
Droughts are dominated by anomalous circulation not anomalous atmospheric moisture content
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Agricultural drought is a sustained soil moisture deficit caused by reduced net moisture flux to the land surface. We show that agricultural droughts can occur when the atmosphere is anomalously wet, challenging the assumption that surface drying reflects atmospheric moisture deficits. Precipitation declines during drought even under increased atmospheric moisture, indicating low precipitation [...]
Sampling Uncertainty is Critical for Setting Forecast-Based Anticipatory Action Triggers
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Risk Analysis
As of 2022, nearly 5 million smallholder farmers across more than a dozen countries are covered by Anticipatory Action (AA) programs. AA programs are aid schemes triggered when seasonal forecasts of precipitation fall below a locally-determined drought threshold. These thresholds are generally calculated to meet a donor- or government-specified expected trigger frequency. However, the [...]
Detecting Changes in Power Plant NOx Emissions Using Deep Learning and TEMPO Satellite Imagery
Published: 2026-10-25
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
NASA's Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument provides hourly daytime observations of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) across North America. These observations could support independent, facility-level monitoring of power plant nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions, filling gaps when continuous emissions monitoring system (CEMS) measurements fail or facilities are not [...]
Robust warming rates, marginal evidence of acceleration and unstable extrapolation: a reproducible reanalysis of statistical trend models for the Berkeley Earth global temperature record
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Statistical Models
Simple trend fits to the global temperature record are widely used to summarise warming, but their uncertainty, their evidence for acceleration and their predictive value are often overstated. We re-analysed an earlier linear and quadratic analysis of the Berkeley Earth Land/Ocean record (1850–2024) that reported in-sample R² values of 0.74 and 0.90 and a post-1970 warming rate of 0.194 °C per [...]
Hydrometeorological Consistency and Structural Differences in High-Resolution Atmospheric Forcing Products over the Gulf Coast
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Hydrology
Kilometer-scale meteorological forcing products are increasingly used in hydrologic applications, yet comparable resolution does not ensure consistent atmospheric structure or derived diagnostics. This study compares AORC and NLDAS-3 across the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast (Texas to the Carolinas) from 2001–2020 using a common spatial footprint and paired days. Relative to AORC, NLDAS-3 exhibits [...]
Storm-Level Independent Verification of Operational Cloud Seeding: Seven Seasons of Utah's Program, 2016-2025
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Meteorology
Operational winter cloud seeding programs claim precipitation increases of 3-15%, but the evaluations supporting these claims are produced by program operators using target/control methods that cannot separate seeding effects from operator storm selection: storms are seeded precisely when atmospheric conditions favor the target areas. This study performs, to the author's knowledge, the first [...]
Why Bandung heard the September 2026 Anak Krakatau eruption and Jakarta did not: eruption timing, ray tracing and search-interest evidence, compared with April 2020
Published: 2026-10-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences
During the night of 4–5 September 2026, residents of the Bandung area, 240–300 km from Anak Krakatau, reported repeated booms and rattling windows, while Jakarta, 150 km from the volcano, reported almost none. The Indonesian meteorological agency (BMKG) first judged the volcano too distant and the winds unfavourable, then attributed the booms to the eruption. We test the volcanic explanation with [...]
Paraglider flight logs as hypsometers: daily temperature profiles of an Alpine valley, its diurnal heating, and the nearly level ceiling of thermals
Published: 2026-10-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
A paraglider flight recorder stores both pressure and GNSS altitude: together they turn routine flight logs into hypsometric measurements of layer-mean virtual temperature. From 86 369 IGC logs of the Valais, Swiss Alps, quality screening retains 13 520 dedicated-instrument flights on 437 days in 2011–2026; 392 days provide at least one profile layer supported by ten flights. At midday, between [...]
Paragliders as probes of the Alpine boundary layer: sink polars from 86 000 flight logs and the flow field of a valley
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
Paraglider flight logs are a dense, free and continuous record of the air over mountains: every thermal day, hundreds of pilots fly for hours along the slopes and across the valleys and record their vertical speed once per second. The obstacle is that a vario measures the air plus the sink of the glider, and the sink polars of paragliders are unknown. We obtain them from the logs themselves. [...]
ORBIT: A new, reduced-complexity air quality model for South Asia
Published: 2026-10-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences
Exposure to outdoor air pollution is the most important environmental health risk worldwide, associated with over a million deaths each year in South Asia alone. To understand how to improve air quality, it is necessary to model how changes in emissions affect changes in pollutant concentrations and human health. However, air quality modeling typically demands substantial computation and [...]
Improvement of Daily Temperature Forecasts from a Prediction Market
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology, Natural Resource Economics, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability
Prediction markets aggregate and distill the collective views of participants who have a financial stake in being correct. They have been shown to produce more accurate forecasts in realms like election results, which are not easily amenable to mechanistic modeling because they entail forecasting human behavior. It is far less clear that prediction markets should improve the accuracy of [...]
Slopes rarely out-warm the floor a 2003–2025 MODIS assessment of deep surface-based night-time inversions over the Malang basin, East Java
Published: 2026-10-03
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology
Nocturnal cold-air pools can trap heat and pollutants in basin cities, but tropical basins are seldom monitored. We assessed deep surface-based night-time inversions over the Malang basin, East Java, Indonesia, from 2003–2025 MODIS Terra and Aqua night-time land surface temperature (LST), using the difference ΔT between a slope band (900–1300 m; mean 1079 m) and the rural basin floor (≤ 600 m; [...]