Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Climate
Probabilistic Streamflow Forecasts for Mississippi River Navigation Risk and Parametric Insurance
Published: 2026-10-11
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 [...]
Evaluation of CMIP6 model performance against GHCND station observations across Asian cities
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Climate
Models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) are commonly used to infer future atmospheric temperatures across the world, including in Asia. This region is warming at an alarming rate, and home to some of the world's most populated countries and many of its most populated, fastest-growing and most heat-vulnerable cities. CMIP models are not always checked against local city-scale [...]
Changes to the Madden-Julian Oscillation with Surface Temperature Warming in Aquaplanet Simulations
Published: 2026-09-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Interactions between waves and the mean-state in the tropics are of fundamental importance for reliable future projection of tropical waves and their impacts under anthropogenic climate change. The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the dominant source of weather variability over many parts of the globe on intraseasonal timescales. In this study, we investigate the influence of mean-state changes [...]
Extreme Precipitation Indices Trends and Patterns in the Philippines
Published: 2026-09-20
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Sciences, Meteorology
The Philippines experiences approximately 86% of its recorded disaster events from extreme precipitation, yet national-scale trend studies remain constrained by sparse station networks and narrow index coverage. This study mapped the spatial patterns and long-term trends of 12 extreme precipitation indices across the Philippine archipelago using 45 years of daily gridded precipitation data from [...]
Unlocking Blue Carbon's Potential Requires Targeted Uncertainty Reductions
Published: 2026-09-18
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Sustainability
Coastal “blue” carbon ecosystems like swamps and marshes are among the most efficient natural carbon sinks on Earth. Consequently, restoring and conserving these wetlands is gaining interest from private and government stakeholders as a nature-based solution to offset greenhouse gas emissions and generate revenue through carbon credits. However, the financial viability of blue carbon crediting is [...]
A Changing North Atlantic Background Amplifies Western European Heatwaves
Published: 2026-09-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Western European summer heatwaves have increased markedly since the 1990s, culminating in the record warmth of May–July 2026 since 1950. We show that this rise is closely associated with the slowly evolving North Atlantic background. We combine two leading April sea surface temperature modes, representing basin-wide warming and a tripole-like pattern, into an Atlantic Two-Mode Index (ATMI). The [...]
Evaluating forecast baselines and network representativeness for daily PM2.5 in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
Published: 2026-09-03
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). [...]
A Project-based Learning Activity Involving Hybrid Intelligence in the Undergraduate Engineering Class
Published: 2026-09-02
Subjects: Climate, Higher Education, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in academic practice, creating opportunities to support learning and improve educational outcomes. We implemented a project-based learning activity in an undergraduate engineering course in which students used meteorological data to construct a temperature time series and assess local climate change at a selected location from the national [...]