Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Atmospheric Sciences
Automated identification, industrial attribution and conditional emission-rate quantification of recurrent CO enhancement source regions from TROPOMI observations
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Remote Sensing
The TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) repeatedly measures global carbon monoxide (CO) total columns, but industrial CO studies generally begin with known cities or facilities; a general method is therefore needed to discover where enhancements recur globally. We developed an automated workflow that searches without facility coordinates. A weakly supervised model screens scenes for [...]
Evaluating forecast baselines and network representativeness for daily PM2.5 in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Meteorology
An order-fair attribution of daily PM2.5 predictability in the Kathmandu Valley assigns 72% of achievable error reduction to persistence, 19% to meteorology and 9% to day-of-year climatology, with the latter two largely redundant; no fitted model, including random forests and gradient boosting tuned by nested chronological cross-validation, outperforms an unfitted lag-1 forecast (11.22 µg m-3). [...]
The Super El Niño–Polar Vortex Paradox QBO Modulation and a Testable Hypothesis for Winter 2026/27
Published: 2026-08-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The absence of major midwinter sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) during the three strongest El Niño winters in the instrumental record—1982/83, 1997/98, and 2015/16—poses an open question at the high-amplitude end of the canonical ENSO–stratosphere pathway. Motivated by the exceptionally strong El Niño developing in 2026, this study re-examines that relationship using publicly available ONI, [...]
Contrasting oil and gas methane emission intensities across Algeria's major production basins derived using MethaneSAT data
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Algeria, Africa's largest natural gas producer and a major European Union gas supplier, has limited basin-scale assessment of oil and gas methane emissions. Here, we use MethaneSAT observations from September 2024 to May 2025 to quantify methane emissions across three Algerian production regions representing 73% of national onshore production. Total methane emissions are 18 t h⁻¹ [11–25] in Hassi [...]
Coupling between Walker and Hadley circulations mediated by low cloud feedback
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
The tropical Pacific hosts the primary region of deep convection and forms the shared ascending branch of the Walker and Hadley circulations, which regulate the distribution of energy, angular momentum, and moisture across the climate system. Despite their importance and spatial entanglement, the dynamical coupling between these two circulations remains poorly understood. Here we show that the [...]
Biological Dynamics for Sustainable Carbon Sequestration
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biology, Climate, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Forest Management, Planetary Biogeochemistry
Earth’s atmosphere is shaped by the interplay of biological systems operating across interlinked biogeochemical cycles and, more recently, by anthropogenic emissions. Here, we thoroughly examine the potential for engineering biological systems across ecosystems for sustainable carbon storage. This centralization and comparative analysis of the potential of all key global ecosystems aims to [...]
Boxology: the isobar–thickness box count as an exact advection integral, and its rendering
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
“Boxology” is the hand-analysis practice of reading thermal advection from the angle at which mean-sea-level-pressure isobars cross 1000–500 hPa thickness contours: steep crossings cut the chart into small quadrilaterals and imply strong advection, while parallel families imply none. This note shows the practice is an identity rather than a rule of thumb, and implements it as a rendered chart [...]
Independent lidar observations support declining low cloud cover trends seen in satellite and reanalysis records
Published: 2026-08-22
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Low clouds strongly influence Earth's radiation budget, yet their response to climate change remains uncertain. Recent satellite and reanalysis studies indicate declining low cloud cover that may have contributed to increasing absorbed solar radiation, but independent ground-based evidence over land is limited. Here we show that ground-based lidar observations support a decrease in low cloud [...]
Large-Scale Modulation of Mesoscale Convective System Propagation and Diurnal Rainfall over the Western Maritime Continent
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology
The western Maritime Continent exhibits a pronounced regional diurnal cycle of rainfall, to which the propagating Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs) make a significant contribution. Using an automated tracking algorithm based on brightness temperature, we quantify the contribution of MCSs to the regional diurnal cycle over Singapore and the South China Sea. MCSs affecting the Singapore sector [...]
Methane emissions intensity mapping from space reveals outsized emissions impact from marginal oil and gas production in the U.S.
Published: 2026-08-09
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane emissions reduction from the oil/gas sector, the largest industrial methane source, is a widely-recognized effective strategy for slowing the rate of climate warming. There are over 600,000 well-pads in the U.S.; one-fifth produce most of the economic value, while the remainder produce limited oil/gas. We use high-resolution MethaneSAT satellite data covering >80% of US onshore [...]
SCI-VIS: Lightweight Visibility Tagging for Coastal Camera Monitoring
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Observations and measurements made from coastal cameras are conditional on the frame being interpretable. Sea fog, glare, rain and condensation on the housing, haze and low light each degrade the imagery, and the shoreline positions, wave measurements and counts derived from a degraded frame are corrupted or spurious. This paper evaluates a per-frame visibility classifier, based on a compact [...]
Cloud-Free Imaging Probability Forecasting for Optical Earth-Observation Tasking over Yerevan, Armenia
Published: 2026-07-18
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth-observation satellites such as Sentinel-2 cannot see through cloud, so a tasking attempt over a cloudy target wastes a limited imaging window along with onboard power and downlink bandwidth. We study whether next-day cloud conditions over Yerevan, Armenia can be forecast accurately enough to automate the binary Go/No-Go tasking decision. Daily cloud-free fractions are derived from [...]
Historical Pattern Effects and Climate Sensitivity Revisited with Novel Constraints on Past Warming Patterns
Published: 2026-07-18
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
The historical record (1850–present) can constrain equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) only if we know the patterns of sea-surface temperature (SST) and sea ice concentration (SIC) that shape radiative feedbacks. Feedbacks depend on spatial patterns of SST and SIC (“pattern effects”), yet the impact of historical SST/SIC uncertainty on feedback estimates has not been systematically quantified. [...]
Improving PM2.5 Estimation from Satellite Aerosol Optical Depth Using Boundary Layer Height and Meteorological Variables
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Accurate estimation of surface particulate matter (PM2.5) from satellite observations remains challenging because aerosol optical depth (AOD) represents column-integrated aerosol loading and is strongly influenced by meteorological conditions. This study investigates the relationship between satellite-derived AOD, meteorological variables, and surface PM2.5 concentrations over Mumbai, India, [...]
Bitwise Reproducibility as an Incomplete Correctness Signal: A Structural Audit for Parallel Spectral GCMs
Published: 2026-07-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Bitwise reproducibility of an OpenMP-parallelized scientific code is usually verified by checksum comparison on a short run—an inductive leap that carries no guarantee at longer integration lengths. We study it instead as a deductive and diagnostic property of the source text, taking a legacy spectral atmospheric general circulation model, whose time step is a reduction over a partitioned [...]