Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Oceanography
Three thresholds and a computer-assisted phase diagram for the spectral stability of periodic hydroelastic Whitham waves
Published: 2026-09-26
Subjects: Glaciology, Non-linear Dynamics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Partial Differential Equations
We study the spectral stability of 2π-periodic travelling waves of the hydroelastic Whitham equation, a scalar model with the full linear dispersion relation of water waves under a thin elastic sheet (e.g. a floating ice cover), as a function of the flexural rigidity T. Besides the modulational cluster at the origin, the zero-amplitude spectrum has, on an interval of T, a collision of opposite [...]
Interface Habitats: An Integrated Observing Strategy for Earth’s Most Dynamic and Consequential Aquatic Boundaries
Published: 2026-09-26
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 [...]
Transient Events: A Rapid-Response, Multi-Platform Observing Strategy for Detecting and Understanding Abrupt Change in Aquatic Ecosystems
Published: 2026-09-26
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biodiversity, Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Marine Biology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Extremes, not average conditions, increasingly govern the state of aquatic ecosystems and the risks they carry for people. Events far outside normal variability can reshape ecosystem structure and function within hours to weeks, and both the observational record and climate projections indicate such extremes are growing more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting. Whether an extreme becomes a [...]
Leveraging Ocean Data and Models: Building the Data Infrastructure, Workforce, and Modeling Capacity to Synthesize Earth’s Ocean Observations
Published: 2026-09-26
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 [...]
Deep Learning to Infer Ocean Dynamics
Published: 2026-09-20
Subjects: Oceanography
Inferring ocean dynamics remains challenging due to the complexity of multiscale nonlinear interactions, sparsity of observations, and limitations of numerical models. Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful data-driven framework that exploits nonlinear dependencies across heterogeneous datasets, complementing traditional approaches. Here, we review recent progress in applying DL to ocean [...]
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 Global Event-Based Benchmark for Tide and Surge Models Beyond the Tide Gauge
Published: 2026-09-18
Subjects: Oceanography, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Coastal flood hindcasting and forecasting form the foundation of effective risk management in coastal regions. They drive emergency response efforts and inform the design of coastal defenses, adaptation strategies, and evidence-based policy. Global coastal sea level models are traditionally validated using time-series regression metrics (i.e., Root Mean Square Error [RMSE], Mean Absolute Error [...]
Variance-ranked sound speed bases misclassify the surface duct: limits of profile RMSE as a proxy for acoustic prediction skill in the Bay of Bengal
Published: 2026-09-17
Subjects: Geography, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sound speed profile (SSP) estimation from surface observables is operationally mature and is evaluated almost universally by profile root-mean-square error. Using 19,934 Argo profiles from the Bay of Bengal (2005–2020), season-stratified empirical orthogonal function (EOF) bases, and BELLHOP transmission loss (TL) at 500 Hz, 1500 Hz and 3500 Hz over 24 held-out locations, we show that this metric [...]
The importance of ice shelf melt rate distributions in modelling of Antarctic ice loss
Published: 2026-09-03
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Glaciology, Oceanography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Ocean-induced basal melting of ice shelves is a major cause of Antarctic ice loss. It is well known that the magnitude of this melt is an important factor to consider when modelling the future evolution of the ice sheet, and values of total melt volume or mean melt rates are often quoted for ice shelves. The finer detail of the distribution of this melt is usually given less attention. Here we [...]
A Reduced-Order Dynamical Model for the Ignition of Diver-Induced Cohesive Silt-Out on Sloping Beds
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Dynamical Systems, Dynamic Systems, Non-linear Dynamics, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A downward fin thrust near a cohesive seabed lofts sediment. Whether this cloud settles or organizes into a self-sustaining down-slope current determines if a diver loses visibility briefly or catastrophically. We reduce the layer-averaged balances of fluid mass, sediment mass, and momentum to a temporal slab of fixed thickness in the weakly entraining limit. This yields an autonomous planar [...]
The limits of ecological decodability of a geospatial foundation-model embedding: a registered evaluation of AlphaEarth over shallow Great Barrier Reef habitats
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Annual satellite embedding fields compress a year of multi-sensor observation into one vector per 10 m pixel, worldwide. We test what ecological information the AlphaEarth embedding holds about shallow (< 10 m) Great Barrier Reef habitats, and where its limits lie. Every candidate output was registered with a pass gate before testing, evaluated under one fixed protocol, and reported pass or [...]
The Unfinished Map: Observing the Indian Ocean through Model-Corrected, Fleet-Based Sensing
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography
We make decisions about the ocean-the largest and most consequential system on Earth-from a sample so sparse it would be judged inadmissible in almost any other science. Less than one-thousandth of one percent of the deep seafloor has ever been seen by a human eye or camera; most deep-ocean observation has been carried out by a handful of wealthy nations; and the Indian Ocean-which has absorbed a [...]
SCI-VIS: Lightweight Visibility Tagging for Coastal Camera Monitoring
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Observations and measurements made from coastal cameras are conditional on the frame being interpretable. Sea fog, glare, rain and condensation on the housing, haze and low light each degrade the imagery, and the shoreline positions, wave measurements and counts derived from a degraded frame are corrupted or spurious. This paper evaluates a per-frame visibility classifier, based on a compact [...]
SCI-OBS: Detection and Classification of People on the Beach and in the Surf Zone
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oceanography, Remote Sensing
Understanding how many people use beaches and surf zones, and what they are doing there, is vital for safety, tourism and coastal management. Camera-based studies of coastal recreation have to date recovered attendance: a headcount, sometimes divided into coarse zones. This paper reports the accuracy at which the same infrastructure resolves attendance into activity composition, using a [...]