Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography
Redefining Uncertainty: A Complete Bayesian Workflow for Ocean Color Remote Sensing
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences
Traditional satellite ocean color algorithms for chlorophyll-a and inherent optical property retrieval rely on deterministic regression models that typically produce single-point predictions without explicit uncertainty quantification. The absence of uncertainty awareness undermines in-situ/model match-ups, reduces predictive reliability, and ultimately erodes user confidence. In the present [...]
The Grand Challenges of WPI-AIMEC: Executive Summary
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Climate, Databases and Information Systems, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Marine Biology, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Biogeochemistry, Remote Sensing, Sustainability
The ocean has a heat capacity 1,000 times greater than that of the atmosphere and stores 50 times more carbon comparatively, thus, constituting a major sink of anthropogenically released greenhouse gases. Warming effects of human activities on the climate system are now undeniably shown to impact marine life and ecosystems, both directly via warming of the ocean and/or indirectly altering ocean [...]
wave-attenuation-1d: An idealized one-dimensional framework for wave attenuation through coastal vegetation using Numba-accelerated shallow water equations
Published: 2025-08-07
Subjects: Applied Mechanics, Environmental Engineering, Fluid Dynamics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Oceanography
Coastal vegetation provides crucial wave attenuation for shoreline protection, yet existing models are either computationally prohibitive or lack transparency for educational purposes. This study presents wave-attenuation-1d, an open-source Python package implementing linearized shallow water equations with vegetation-induced drag to simulate wave propagation through coastal vegetation. The [...]
DASNordicSLR - Sea Level Projections for Northern Europe
Published: 2025-08-05
Subjects: Oceanography
Sea level rise is an inevitable consequence and one of the most significant threats posed by climate change, increasing the risk of flooding in low-lying areas along the German coast. Based on the IPCC 6th Assessment Report (AR6) projections we aim to deliver improved projections of relative sea level change for Northern Europe’s coastal regions. These projections are available as spatial data up [...]
Robust networks of rainfall extremes emerge despite fragile ocean monsoon causality under Internal variability
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology, Oceanography
Climate ready multi sectoral risk management relies on understanding not only where extreme rainfall occurs but also how such events synchronize across regions and interact with internal climate modes. The stability of synchronized rainfall networks and remote climate forcings under internal climate variability (ICV), especially when aggregating ensemble simulations for statistical robustness, [...]
Future Sea Ice-Ocean and Biological Productivity Changes in the North Water Polynya Region under Policy Relevant Warming Levels
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The North Water Polynya (NOW) is one of the most productive biological regions in the Arctic with high importance to Inuit and local communities of Nunavut and Greenland. To provide insights into the potential changes of this region as global temperatures rise, we investigated the sea ice, and physical and biological oceanic responses of the NOW to low (2 °C) and high (3.5 °C) levels of warming [...]
Aquascan: Graph-Based Learning for Distributed Marine Sensing
Published: 2025-07-04
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Marine monitoring faces unprecedented challenges as climate change and human activities reshape ocean ecosystems. Traditional tracking methods struggle with the scale and complexity of modern marine sensing needs. This paper proposes distributed networks of low-cost drifting sensors and presents a comparative study of heterogeneous graph neural networks (GNNs) versus Kalman filters for predicting [...]
Topological and Information-Theoretic Analysis of Climate-Driven Indonesian Throughflow Dynamics
Published: 2025-06-29
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Climate, Non-linear Dynamics, Oceanography
The Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) represents the sole tropical pathway connecting Pacific and Indian Oceans, yet quantitative understanding of climate mode influences on its variability remains incomplete. We applied information-theoretic and topological frameworks to analyze 34 years (1984-2017) of observational ITF transport data alongside ENSO and IOD indices. Bootstrap analysis revealed [...]
Quantifying tidal impacts on Arctic sea ice: An unexpected mechanism for the regional delay of summer melting
Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Oceanography
Tides are an important factor shaping the sea ice system in the Arctic Ocean, by altering vertical heat fluxes and advection patterns. Unfortunately, observations are sparse and the analysis of tides is complicated by the proximity of wind-driven inertial oscillations to the semi-diurnal frequencies. Furthermore, computational costs typically prohibit the inclusion of tides in ocean models, [...]
Strengthening ITF and Weakening AMOC: Time Series Evidence of Trends and Causal Pathways to Agulhas Variability
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Oceanography, Statistical Models
Multi-decadal observations of major ocean circulation systems reveal contrasting trends and complex inter-basin connectivity patterns that challenge traditional conceptualizations of global ocean circulation. Using non-parametric trend analysis, multi-method causality testing, and wavelet coherence techniques, we analyzed volume transport time series spanning 1984--2023 for the Indonesian [...]
Phytoplankton variable stoichiometry modifies key biogeochemical fluxes and the functioning of the ocean biological pump
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Oceanography
Ocean biota absorb carbon at the surface and export some to the ocean interior via the biological pump, affecting surface carbon, air-sea CO₂ exchange, and climate. Marine phytoplankton growth is often limited by nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, silicon). The efficiency of carbon export is therefore constrained by nutrient availability and the nutrient/carbon ratios in the biota [...]
The Motion and Tilts of Subsurface Floats due to Surface Waves
Published: 2025-05-16
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Subsurface and nearly neutrally-buoyant floats can be stable, well-behaved platforms for measuring ocean dynamics in the near-surface wave zone. Here we measure and model the tilt of such platforms due to the waves using data from Lagrangian floats built at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL/UW) and carrying a Nortek Signature 1000 Current Profiler with an AHRS (Attitude and Heading Reference [...]
Evaluating Turbulence Parameterizations at Gray Zone Resolutions for the Ocean Surface Boundary Layer
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Fluid Dynamics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Turbulent mixing in ocean boundary layers is often fully parameterized as a subgrid-scale process in realistic ocean simulations. However, recent submesoscale modeling studies have advanced to a horizontal grid spacing of O(10 m) that is comparable to, or even smaller than, the typical depth of the turbulent surface boundary layer. Meanwhile, efforts toward realistic large-eddy simulations (LES) [...]
Enhancing and Interpreting Deep Learning for Sea Ice Charting using the AutoICE Benchmark
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography
Accurate mapping of sea ice is crucial for marine navigation and monitoring climate change. Automating sea ice mapping remains challenging due to remotely-sensed signal ambiguity, the dynamic nature of sea ice, and limited field measurements. The AutoICE challenge recently introduced a benchmark to advance deep learning for sea ice mapping. Top-performing solutions used the U-Net architecture [...]
The effects of rain on a Ka-band swath altimeter: lessons learned from the SWOT mission
Published: 2025-04-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission offers unprecedented Ka-band swath altimetry measurements via its KaRIn instrument, but remains highly sensitive to signal attenuation by precipitation. This study investigates the radiometric behavior of KaRIn under rain conditions, focusing on the characterization, correction, and physical interpretation of the normalized radar backscatter [...]