Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography
Hydroelectric Regulation Decouples Arctic Silica Delivery from the Diatom Bloom: A Climate-Independent Causal Attribution Across Twenty Subarctic Rivers
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Large subarctic rivers deliver most of their dissolved nutrients during the spring freshet, in approximate phase with the ice-edge diatom bloom that those nutrients support. Hydroelectric regulation flattens the river hydrograph, holding back the freshet and raising winter discharge, and in doing so it redistributes nutrient delivery in time. Across twenty subarctic rivers spanning the Arctic [...]
Transformation of climatologically anomalous water masses
Published: 2026-05-15
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Wederiveanovelanomalous water mass budget framework in which water masses are defined by bounds on tracer anomalies rather than absolute tracer values, extending Water Mass Transformation (WMT) theory to ocean variability and extremes. The material derivative of tracer anomalies introduces three additional transformation terms absent from the standard WMT framework: advection of climatological [...]
Learning unresolved coastal dynamics in hydrodynamic models
Published: 2026-05-02
Subjects: Fluid Dynamics, Oceanography
Coastal hydrodynamic models play a vital role in understanding and predicting flooding, but practical computational constraints and uncertainties in boundary conditions and bathymetry lead to systematic errors in local sea level. We show that much of this error is not random but reflects a stable, site-specific response that can be learned from model output and observations. We develop a [...]
Why the Cap-Ferret sand spit is collapsing
Published: 2026-04-27
Subjects: Geomorphology, Hydrology, Oceanography, Sedimentology
The Cap-Ferret sand spit (SW France) exhibits a pattern of coastal instability that combines chronic shoreline retreat (8.7 m·yr⁻¹ at the tip, Robinet et al. 2025), sudden vertical collapses of emplaced structures (WW2 blockhaus 2024, 2026; oyster-farm sector 1936, 1977; Hortense promenade 1999, 2000, 2014, 2019), and progressive deepening of submarine pits (Hortense-Pointe depression volume [...]
Spatiotemporal evolution of temperature extremes across India’s agro-climatic zones (1951–2025)
Published: 2026-04-11
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Meteorology, Oceanography
Long-term changes in temperature extremes are a robust signature of anthropogenic climate change, yet their spatial structure across India’s agro-climatic zones (ACZs) remains insufficiently resolved at policy scales. Here, we quantify changes in temperature extremes across 14 mainland ACZs during 1951–2025 using the India Meteorological Department 1°×1° gridded daily dataset. We compute 22 [...]
Seasonal Shift in the Dominant Pathway Energizing Mesoscale Eddies in the California Current
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mesoscale eddies are the dominant reservoir of kinetic energy in the ocean, yet the mechanisms that generate and maintain them in eastern boundary current systems remain incompletely assessed. Here we use a 1-km resolution simulation of the California Current System (CCS) to diagnose and quantify the processes that supply kinetic energy to the mesoscale band. A pronounced seasonal transition is [...]
Introducing Microalgae Carbon Fixation and Sinking (MCFS): a new approach for controlled and scalable CDR
Published: 2026-04-08
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Climate, Oceanography, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Achieving global climate targets requires scalable and durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies to tackle both historical and hard-to- abate emissions. We introduce Microalgae Carbon Fixation and Sinking (MCFS), a marine CDR methodology designed to enhance carbon fixation and export to the deep ocean through a controlled process. At the core of the MCFS approach is a tailored substrate: [...]
A new diagnostic of air-sea interaction reveals ocean control of turbulent heat flux in the South Asian Summer Monsoon
Published: 2026-04-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Oceanography
Air-sea interaction plays a central role in the South Asian summer monsoon, with processes such as surface turbulent heat fluxes, upper ocean mechanical mixing, surface buoyancy forcing, and surface moisture fluxes providing bridges between the ocean and atmosphere. The air-sea heat flux responds to internal variability in the ocean and atmosphere, as well as feedbacks arising from their [...]
The Oceanic Response to Winds in the Antarctic Sea Ice Loss at the end of the 1970s
Published: 2026-03-28
Subjects: Climate, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The sea ice extent (SIE) in the Southern Ocean experienced a substantial decline in the late 1970s, although less pronounced than the one observed in 2016. Though several studies explain the decline since 2016, the 1970s drop is critical in understanding the long-term variability of SIE. To investigate the underlying mechanisms for this decline, we conducted wind stress-forced multi- ensemble [...]
Fluctuation-induced dissipation for ocean surface waves
Published: 2026-03-22
Subjects: Fluid Dynamics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
Phase averaging is a one-time operation. Irreversibletransport is not.Here we identify a coupling hidden in the Navier-Stokesequations for surface waves propagating through turbulencewhose one-time phase average vanishes but whose two-timeautocorrelation yields a finite Green-Kubo frictioncoefficient.Classical phase averaging removes this stochastic vortexforce, the bilinear coupling between wave [...]
Non-peer reviewed Report submitted to Seismica: Correlation of DAS Strain Data and Oceanographic Variables in the North-East Atlantic
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Geophysics and Seismology, Oceanography
DAS recordings close to the coast are influenced by pressure signals from land- and seaward ocean surface gravity waves. The amplitude and period of the signal can serve as proxies for the sea state. Measurements along the cable at greater water depths show secondary microseisms related to the sea state away from the shore. The significant wave height (SWH) and ocean currents along the cable can [...]
Assessing the medium-term risk to reef damage and rubble generation for the Great Barrier Reef
Published: 2026-03-06
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Oceanography, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Coral reef systems live in multi-hazard environments and are exposed to a wide range of disturbance events that operate at different spatial and temporal scales. We identify seven drivers derived from hazards that have and can result in reef damage in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR): waves, winds, bottom current velocity, coral bleaching, crown-of-thorns seastar outbreaks, ship groundings, and [...]
Basal Melt Dominance in Grounding-Line Dynamics: SAR Interferometry Reveals How Ocean Thermal Forcing Outpaces Tidal and Seasonal Controls in Antarctic Ice Shelves
Published: 2026-02-18
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The grounding line hinge position for the Fimbul Ice Shelf (Antarctic Peninsula) was determined using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometric data from June 2023 through October 2024. The data were used to determine the hinge position over eight different time intervals (i.e., SAR Pairs) at an average spatial resolution of 20 meters. The Fimbul Ice Shelf area of interest (AOI) was defined [...]
Resonant Platform Response and Vertical Velocity Biases in ADCP Measurements from Quasi-Lagrangian Platforms
Published: 2026-02-13
Subjects: Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Autonomous surface and subsurface platforms equipped with acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) are increasingly used to observe ocean velocities, but in the presence of surface waves these measurements can be biased by orbital motion and wave-induced platform tilting. Previous work quantified such biases for idealized platform responses that were in phase with the wave forcing. Here we [...]
Compound Drivers of Antarctic Sea Ice Loss
Published: 2026-02-10
Subjects: Oceanography
Antarctic sea-ice extent began declining since 2015, reaching its lowest extent in the post-1970s observational era in 2023. To diagnose the drivers of this decline, we analyse an observationally constrained sea ice-ocean model spanning 2013-2023, and identify three distinct phases of sea-ice retreat. First, an intensification of westerly winds preconditioned the Southern Ocean via increased [...]