Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Atmospheric Sciences
Extreme smog challenge of India intensified by increasing lower tropospheric stability
Published: 2021-08-30
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Air pollution in India severely impacts the air quality, public health and economy in one of the world’s most densely populated regions. Persistent agricultural fires during the late-autumn period and widespread winter-time pollution contribute to the extreme smog in south Asia, especially affecting the entire northern India. While the links between anthropogenic emissions, air quality and health [...]
Fire-Generated Tornadic Vortices
Published: 2021-08-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology
Fire-generated tornadic vortices (FGTVs) linked to pyrocumulonimbi (pyroCb) are a potentially deadly, yet poorly understood and seldom observed wildfire hazard. In this study we use radar and satellite observations to examine three FGTV cases during high impact wildfires during the 2020 fire season in California, USA. We establish that these FGTVs each exhibit tornado-strength anticyclonic [...]
Comprehensive aerial survey quantifies high methane emissions from the New Mexico Permian Basin
Published: 2021-08-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Limiting emissions of climate-warming methane from oil and gas (O&G) is a major opportunity for short-term climate benefits. We deploy a basin-wide airborne survey of the New Mexico Permian Basin, spanning 35,923 km^2, 26,292 active wells, and over 15,000 km of natural gas pipelines using an independently-validated hyperspectral methane point source detection and quantification system. The [...]
Safety and Belonging in the Field: A Checklist for Educators
Published: 2021-08-19
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Cosmochemistry, Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Fresh Water Studies, Geochemistry, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Geology, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Higher Education, Human Geography, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Mineral Physics, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Geography, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Planetary Sciences, Outdoor Education, Paleobiology, Paleontology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Planetary Geochemistry, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Planetary Glaciology, Planetary Hydrology, Planetary Mineral Physics, Planetary Sciences, Planetary Sedimentology, Remote Sensing, Sedimentology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Soil Science, Spatial Science, Speleology, Stratigraphy, Sustainability, Tectonics and Structure, Volcanology, Water Resource Management
Ensuring taught fieldwork is a positive, generative, collective, and valuable experience for all participants requires considerations beyond course content. To guarantee safety and belonging, participants’ identities (backgrounds and protected characteristics) must be considered as a part of fieldwork planning and implementation. Furthermore, getting fieldwork right is an important step in [...]
Developing a long-term high-resolution winter fog climatology over south Asia using satellite observations from 2002 to 2020
Published: 2021-07-18
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences
The vast Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) south of the Himalaya are subject to dense fog every year during winter months (December-January), severely disrupting rail, air and public transport of millions of people living in northern India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Air pollution combined with high moisture availability in the shallow boundary layer, are important factors affecting the persistence [...]
Evaluating Short-Term Spatio-Temporal Tropospheric Variability in Multi-Temporal SAR Interferograms Using LES Models
Published: 2021-07-13
Subjects: Aerospace Engineering, Atmospheric Sciences, Computational Engineering, Earth Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Meteorology, Multivariate Analysis, Signal Processing
Atmospheric delay has a significant impact on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry, inducing spatial phase errors and decorrelation in extreme weather condition. For Low Earth Orbit (LEO) SAR missions, the atmosphere can be considered as being spatio-temporally frozen due to the short integration time. Geosynchronous (GEO) SAR missions, however, have short revisit times and extensive [...]
Two-fluid single-column modelling of Rayleigh-Bénard convection as a step towards multi-fluid modelling of atmospheric convection
Published: 2021-06-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences
Multi-fluid models have recently been proposed as an approach to improving the representation of convection in weather and climate models. This is an attractive framework as it is fundamentally dynamical, removing some of the assumptions of mass-flux convection schemes which are invalid at current model resolutions. However, it is still not understood how best to close the multi-fluid equations [...]
Ubiquity of human-induced changes in climate variability
Published: 2021-06-12
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
While climate change mitigation targets necessarily concern maximum mean state changes, understanding impacts and developing adaptation strategies will be largely contingent on how climate variability responds to increasing anthropogenic perturbations. Here we present a new 100-member large ensemble of climate change projections conducted with the Community Earth System Model version 2 to examine [...]
On the statistical learning analysis of rain gauge data over the Natuna Islands
Published: 2021-06-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
This article presents state-of-the-art statistical learning methods for analyzing rain gauge data over the Natuna Islands. By using shape preserving piecewise cubic interpolation, we managed to interpolate 671 null values from the daily precipitation data. Dominant periodicity analysis of daily precipitation signals using Lomb-Scargle Power Spectral Density shows annual, intraseasonal, and [...]
Detection of Interannual Ensemble Forecast Signals over the North Atlantic and Europe using Atmospheric Circulation Regimes
Published: 2021-05-27
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
To study the forced variability of atmospheric circulation regimes, the use of model ensembles is often necessary for identifying statistically significant signals as the observed data constitute a small sample and are thus strongly affected by the noise associated with sampling uncertainty. However, the regime representation is itself affected by noise within the atmosphere, which can make it [...]
Meteorites that produce K-feldspar-rich ejecta blankets correspond to mass extinctions.
Published: 2021-05-24
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Earth Sciences, Geology, Other Planetary Sciences, Paleontology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Meteorite impacts load the atmosphere with dust and cover the Earth‘s surface with debris. They have long been debated as a trigger of mass extinctions through Earth‘s history. Impact winters generally last <100 years, whereas ejecta blankets persist for 10^3-10^5 years. Here we show that only meteorite impacts that emplaced ejecta blankets rich in K-feldspar (Kfs) correlate to Earth system [...]
The carbon cycle of southeast Australia during 2019-2020: Drought, fires and subsequent recovery
Published: 2021-05-13
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
2019 was the hottest and driest year on record for southeast Australia leading to bushfires of unprecedented extent. Ecosystem carbon losses due to drought and fire are believed to have been substantial, but have not been well quantified. Here, we utilize space-based measurements of trace gases (TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument XCO, Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 XCO2) and up-scaled GPP (FluxSat [...]
Global Assessment of Oil and Gas Methane Ultra-Emitters
Published: 2021-05-07
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane emissions from oil and gas (O&G) production and transmission represent a significant contribution to climate change. These emissions comprise sporadic releases of large amounts of methane during maintenance operations or equipment failures not accounted for in current inventory estimates. We collected and analyzed hundreds of very large releases from atmospheric methane images sampled [...]
The gap between atmospheric nitrogen deposition experiments and reality
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Forest Biology, Other Environmental Sciences, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Soil Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic activities have dramatically altered the global nitrogen (N) cycle. Atmospheric N deposition, primarily from combustion of biomass and fossil fuels, has caused acidification of precipitation and freshwater and triggered intense research into ecosystem responses to this pollutant. Experimental simulations of N deposition have been the main scientific tool to understand ecosystem [...]
A deep-learning estimate of the decadal trends in the Southern Ocean carbon storage
Published: 2021-04-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Uptake of atmospheric carbon by the ocean, especially at high latitudes, plays an important role in offsetting anthropogenic emissions. At the surface of the Southern Ocean south of 30◦S, the ocean carbon uptake, which had been weakening in 1990s, strengthened in the 2000s. However, sparseness of in-situ measurements in the interior make it difficult to compute changes in carbon storage below [...]