Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Climate
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 [...]
Historical distribution of managed honeybee colonies (Apis mellifera) in 18th-century Spain: A standardized dataset (v1: Cáceres)
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
This data descriptor presents a standardized, geographically harmonized dataset of managed honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies in the current province of Cáceres (Spain) during the mid-18th century (1750–1754). Data was extracted from the Ensenada Cadastre primary manuscript sources. The dataset encompasses 207 Local Administrative Units (LAU) and records a minimum threshold of 165,387 managed [...]
Detecting Changes in Power Plant NOx Emissions Using Deep Learning and TEMPO Satellite Imagery
Published: 2026-10-24
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 [...]
Random-split validation overstates the skill of machine-learning models of global coral bleaching severity
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Statistical Methodology
Global compilations of coral bleaching surveys are increasingly used to train machine-learning models of bleaching severity, but such models are often evaluated with random train–test splits that ignore duplicated records, spatial dependence and differences among contributing survey programmes. We re-examined an earlier analysis of the Global Coral Bleaching Database (BCO-DMO dataset 773466) that [...]
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 [...]
Ecosystem community structure shapes carbon dynamics in the ocean
Published: 2026-10-19
Subjects: Climate, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Understanding how marine ecosystems influence air–sea CO2 flux under climate change remains a major uncertainty in ocean carbon-cycle projections. Progress is hampered by insufficient representation of ecosystem complexity in climate models and insufficient observations for developing and calibrating complex marine ecosystem models. We present a novel three-branch ensemble of the PlankTOM12 [...]
Deteriorating climate conditions for Australian wheat production
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Climate
Wheat yields are highly sensitive to climate extremes, but previous studies risk underestimating their influence due to a reliance on highly aggregated agricultural data. Here we combine nationwide farm-level agricultural data with machine learning to identify the key drivers of Australian wheat yield and assess how climate conditions for wheat production have changed over recent decades. We find [...]
Probabilistic Streamflow Forecasts for Mississippi River Navigation Risk and Parametric Insurance
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Fresh Water Studies, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Mississippi River navigation is disrupted by both low and high water extremes, yet shippers, ports, and terminals lack a simple instrument to transfer that risk. We test whether probabilistic forecasts of monthly streamflow can provide useful navigation-risk information. Using pretrained Chronos-2 at three major Mississippi River subbasin outlets, we compute navigation risk probabilities, [...]
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 [...]
On the pattern, magnitude, and timing of anthropogenic heat uptake in the Southern Ocean
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Most of the anthropogenic heat absorbed by the ocean enters through the Southern Ocean, yet the processes that set the pattern, magnitude, and timing of this uptake remain unclear. Using a climate model (CESM1) under abrupt 4xCO2, we show that uptake by the preindustrial ocean circulation alone accounts for more than half of the Southern Ocean uptake and reproduces its slow decline. We isolate [...]
Transferability of ML emulators for polar RCM surface melt under different forcings: Limitations and recommendations
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Climate, Glaciology
Machine learning emulators provide a computationally efficient alternative to physically based regional climate and surface mass balance models, but their applicability depends on their ability to generalize beyond training conditions. In this study, we assess the transferability of a melt emulator trained on output from the regional climate model HIRHAM5 forced by ERA-Interim, CESM2, and [...]
Climate Sensitivity from 21st-Century Trends in Earth's Energy Imbalance
Published: 2026-09-26
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Atmospheric Sciences, Climate
Earth's energy imbalance has increased rapidly since continuous satellite observations began in 2001, raising concern that equilibrium climate sensitivity may be higher than in recent assessments. Here we use energy-budget trends over 2006–2024 to estimate climate sensitivity in a Bayesian framework, accounting for uncertainty in observations, forcing, variability, and pattern effects. Climate [...]
Interface Habitats: An Integrated Observing Strategy for Earth’s Most Dynamic and Consequential Aquatic Boundaries
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
One line, no hard line breaks — safe to copy and paste: Interface Habitats – the dynamic boundaries where water meets land, the seafloor, the atmosphere, and ice, and where fronts, eddies, and filaments draw comparably sharp boundaries within the water itself – are among Earth's most productive, diverse, and rapidly changing ecosystems, and the site of most human interaction with aquatic [...]
Leveraging Ocean Data and Models: Building the Data Infrastructure, Workforce, and Modeling Capacity to Synthesize Earth’s Ocean Observations
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Computer Sciences, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Geology, Hydrology, Meteorology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Oceanography, Other Earth Sciences, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
NASA’s aquatic and marine research enterprise within the overarching NASA Biosphere Program is entering an era of unprecedented data abundance. MODIS and the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission already generate ocean color data at rates that strain legacy processing and archiving workflows, and forthcoming missions will add further volume and complexity. These satellite [...]
Carbon and the Elements of Life: Integrated Observing and Modeling of Marine Biological Carbon Cycles
Published: 2026-09-25
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Biology, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The global ocean acts as a massive reservoir for carbon dioxide, establishing ocean biogeochemistry as a primary driver of global carbon distributions [1-3]. This dynamic system is mediated by living organisms that cycle carbon and other elements through the ocean interior and air-sea interface, and is already being altered by warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and shifting nutrient supply [...]