Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Atmospheric Sciences
Urban Air Quality Modeling Using Low-Cost Sensor Network and Data Assimilation in the Aburra Valley, Colombia
Published: 2020-10-29
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring
The use of low air quality networks has been increasing in recent years to study urban pollution dynamics. Here we show the evaluation of the operational Aburra Valley's low-cost network against the official monitoring network. The results show that the PM2.5 low-cost measurements are very close to those observed by the official network. Additionally, the low-cost allows a higher spatial [...]
The Global Warming Potential Misrepresents the Physics of Global Warming Thereby Misleading Policy Makers
Published: 2020-10-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
The Global Warming Potential (GWP) is a widely used metric used to compare the climate change effects of various greenhouse gases. Although GWP has an established role in international climate agreements, GWP does not, in general, describe any specific identifiable impact of greenhouse gas emissions on climate. It is argued here that GWP is unphysical, unintuitive, arbitrary, ignores the time [...]
Correcting 19th and 20th century sea surface temperatures improves simulations of Atlantic hurricane activity
Published: 2020-08-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Changes in the statistics of North Atlantic hurricanes are known to depend upon the pattern of tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs). Dynamical and statistical models are key tools to predict future hurricane activity, with our confidence in this application rooted in the models’ ability to skillfully reproduce hurricane variations over the past 30-40 years, when satellite data allows [...]
A Statistical Evaluation of WRF-LES Trace Gas Dispersion Using Project Prairie Grass Measurements
Published: 2020-08-17
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In recent years, new measurement systems have been deployed to monitor and quantify methane emissions from the natural gas sector. Large-eddy simulation (LES) has complemented measurement campaigns by serving as a controlled environment in which to study plume dynamics and sampling strategies. However, with few comparisons to controlled-release experiments, the accuracy of LES for modeling [...]
An Eddy-Zonal Flow Feedback Model for Propagating Annular Modes
Published: 2020-07-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The variability of the zonal-mean large-scale extratropical circulation is often studied using individual modes obtained from empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analyses. The prevailing reduced-order model of the leading EOF (EOF1) of zonal-mean zonal wind, called the annular mode, consists of an eddy-mean flow interaction mechanism that results in a positive feedback of EOF1 onto itself. [...]
Mass independent fractionation of even and odd mercury isotopes during atmospheric mercury redox reactions
Published: 2020-07-08
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mass independent fractionation (MIF) of even mass number mercury (Hg) stable isotopes is observed in rainfall and gaseous elemental Hg0 globally, and is used to quantify atmospheric Hg deposition pathways. The chemical reaction and underlying even-Hg MIF mechanism are unknown however, and speculated to be caused by Hg photo-oxidation on aerosols at the tropopause. Here we investigate the Hg [...]
Surprising Changes in Aerosol Loading over India Amid COVID-19 Lockdown
Published: 2020-07-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Using ground-based and satellite observation along with aerosol reanalysis products, we show a widespread reduction in aerosol loading over the Indian subcontinent during the COVID-19 (COronaVIrus Disease 2019) lockdown. The pre-lockdown and lockdown period considered in the present study is 20th February–20th March 2020 and 24th March–22nd April 2020. In terms of aerosol optical depth (AOD), [...]
Deep spatial transformers for autoregressive data-driven forecasting of geophysical turbulence
Published: 2020-07-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Computer Sciences, Dynamical Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fluid Dynamics, Geophysics and Seismology, Mathematics, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics
A deep spatial transformer based encoder-decoder model has been developed to autoregressively predict the time evolution of the upper layers stream function of a two-layered quasi-geostrophic (QG) system without any information about the lower layers stream function. The spatio-temporal complexity of QG flow is comparable to the complexity of 500hPa Geopotential Height (Z500) of fully coupled [...]
Tropical cyclone response to anthropogenic warming as simulated by a mesoscale-resolving global coupled earth system model
Published: 2020-06-19
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are extreme storm systems that form over warm tropical oceans. Along their track TCs can mix up cold water which can further impact their development. Due to the adoption of lower ocean model resolutions, previous modeling studies on the TC response to greenhouse warming underestimate such oceanic feedbacks. To address the robustness of TC projections in the presence of [...]
Seasonal impact-based mapping of compound hazards
Published: 2020-06-17
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Mathematics, Multivariate Analysis, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
Impact-based, seasonal mapping of compound hazards is proposed. It is pragmatic, identifies phenomena to drive the research agenda, produces outputs relevant to stakeholders, and could be applied to many hazards globally. Illustratively, flooding and wind damage can co-occur, worsening their joint impact, yet where wet and windy seasons combine has not yet been systematically mapped. Here, [...]
Decomposing the Drivers of Polar Amplification with a Single Column Model.
Published: 2020-06-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The precise mechanisms driving Arctic amplification are still under debate. Previous attribution methods based on top-of-atmosphere energy budgets have assumed all forcings and feedbacks lead to vertically-uniform temperature changes, with any departures from this collected into the lapse-rate feedback. We propose an alternative attribution method using a single column model that accounts for the [...]
Large model parameter and structural uncertainties in global projections of urban heat waves
Published: 2020-06-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Urban heat waves (UHWs) are strongly associated with socioeconomic impacts. Reliable projections of these extremes are pressingly needed for local actions in the context of extreme event preparedness and mitigation. Such information, however, is not available because current multi-model projections largely lack a representation of urban areas. Here, we use a newly-developed urban climate emulator [...]
Atmospheric thermal convection and strong chaotic fluctuations of global temperature on Earth and on Mars
Published: 2020-06-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
It is shown that the atmospheric thermal (buoyancy driven) convection plays the main role in generation of the strong chaotic fluctuations of the global temperature through the Kolmogorov-Bolgiano-Obukhov mechanism (in the frames of the distributed chaos approach). It is valid for the planets with substantial atmosphere such as the Earth and Mars. Direct numerical simulations, the Berkeley Earth [...]
Observation-based Simulations of Humidity and Temperature Using Quantile Regression
Published: 2020-05-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Statistics and Probability
The human impacts of changes in heat events depend on changes in the joint behavior of temperature and humidity. Little is currently known about these complex joint changes, either in observations or projections from general circulation models (GCMs). Further, GCMs do not fully reproduce the observed joint distribution, implying a need for simulation methods that combine information from GCMs [...]
UNSEEN trends: Detecting decadal changes in 100-year precipitation extremes
Published: 2020-05-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Sample sizes of observed climate extremes are typically too small to reliably constrain non-stationary behaviour. To facilitate detection of non-stationarities in 100-year precipitation values over a short period of 35 years (1981-2015), we apply the UNprecedented Simulated Extreme ENsemble (UNSEEN) approach, by pooling ensemble members and lead times from the ECMWF seasonal prediction system [...]