Feed aggregator

Publication date: Available online 25 July 2024

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): B.A. Ojapinwa, E.O. Oyeyemi, A.O. Akala

Publication date: Available online 25 July 2024

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Jeong-Heon Kim, Young-Sil Kwak

Publication date: Available online 25 July 2024

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Yi Qi, Ying Ding, Yu Shi, Chao Peng

Publication date: Available online 24 July 2024

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Gang Yan, Jiajun Shu, Deng Zhou, Xinfei Yu

NOAA's 2024-25 Annual High Tide Flooding Outlook predicts fewer high-tide flood days than last year.

Observing atmospheric rivers using multi-GNSS airborne radio occultation: system description and data evaluation
Bing Cao, Jennifer S. Haase, Michael J. Murphy Jr., and Anna M. Wilson
Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2024-119,2024
Preprint under review for AMT (discussion: open, 0 comments)
This paper describes an Airborne Radio Occultation (ARO) observation system installed on reconnaissance aircraft that uses GPS signal refraction in the atmosphere to retrieve information about the temperature and moisture in the storm environment as far away as 400 km surrounding the flight track. The characteristics and quality of 1700 ARO refractivity profiles were assessed. These observations are collected to help understand atmospheric rivers and improve their forecasting.

As we focused our microscope on the soil sample for the first time, bits of organic material came into view: a tiny poppy seed, the compound eye of an insect, broken willow twigs and spikemoss spores. Dark-colored spheres produced by soil fungi dominated our view.

There's an important dividing line in the history of recent Texas earthquakes—those occurring before and after 2017, when the establishment of the Texas Seismological Network (TexNet) introduced the ability to monitor seismic events to much lower magnitude.

Clouds have for decades been a bugbear for remote sensing of land surface temperature—one of the most important earth system metrics, used in everything from tracking climate change to predicting wildfires. A new approach incorporating machine learning appears to have solved this challenge

Groundwater is a vital resource, sustaining plants and ecosystems, ensuring agricultural production and serving as a core component of drinking water supplies. However, climate change and anthropogenic pressures can threaten groundwater availability, especially in southwestern Europe.

Abstract

Due to their severity and lack of predictability, understanding and forecasting extreme precipitation events (EPEs) is critical for disaster risk reduction. The present work documents the large-scale environment of tropical EPEs based on a 42-year data set combining dense rain-gauge networks that cover several tropical small islands and coastal regions. Approximately 10%–30% of EPEs are associated with a tropical storm or cyclone (TC), except for Reunion, for which its high topography makes it reach 55%. TCs multiply the EPE probability by a factor of 4–15, especially during TCs of category 1 or higher. A composite analysis demonstrates that the remaining large part of EPEs occurs within large-scale and strong moist, convective, and cyclonic wind anomalies resulting from the superimposition of intraseasonal, seasonal-to-annual, and interannual timescales. These intense anomalies come essentially from intraseasonal variability, and lower frequencies improve the effect of intraseasonal events in creating a favorable environment for EPEs.

Abstract

The Gardner region is a well-known shield volcanic complex on the Moon. Its magma origin and formation mechanism are of significant interest but still enigmatic. To reveal the subsurface structure of this volcanic complex, we propose a new 3-D inversion method of the gravity field based on the regularizations of the L1 norm of the model and its gradients. The model test indicates that our proposed method can recover the density structures with high resolution. Subsequently, we apply it to the Bouguer gravity data in the Gardner region. Our result shows a large, dense body with a volume of about 45 × 45 × 13 km3 centered under the topographic bulge of the Gardner Plateau. We infer that this structure is most likely dense basalts trapped at the crust-mantle boundary as a sill and acted as the magma reservoir that has fed the volcanic complex in the Gardner area.

Abstract

Mid-tropospheric elevated moist layers (EMLs) near the melting level have been found in various regional observational studies in the tropics. Recently, a preponderance of EMLs in the presence of aggregated convection was found in cloud resolving simulations of radiative convective equilibrium (RCE), highlighting a significant circulation coupling. Here, we present global monthly EML occurrence rates based on reanalysis, yielding a broader view on where and when EMLs occur in the real world. Over the Atlantic, EML occurrence follows a seasonal cycle that maximizes in summer, aligning with maximized ITCZ intensity and organization. Resembling the results in RCE, the large-scale circulation over the Atlantic shifts from a deep overturning in January to a bottom-heavy circulation in July. While EMLs embedded in the July cross-equatorial Hadley cell are found to be sourced from the ITCZ, EMLs north of the ITCZ emerge from the strongly sheared zonal flow over West Africa.

Abstract

The electromagnetic interaction between Europa and the plasma sheet in the Jovian magnetosphere generates Alfvén waves, ultimately generating auroral footprints in Jupiter's atmosphere. The position of Europa's auroral footprint is a proxy for travel time of the Alfvén waves. We measured Europa's footprint position using the far-ultraviolet images of Jupiter obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope in two observing campaigns in 2014 and 2022. The measured footprint position indicates a longer Alfvén travel time in the 2022 campaign. We retrieved the plasma sheet parameters at Europa's orbit from the footprint position by tracing the Alfvén waves launched at Europa and found an increase of both mass density and temperature in the plasma sheet in 2022. The Poynting flux generated at Europa is calculated with the retrieved plasma sheet parameters, which suggests the total energy transfer from Europa to its auroral footprint is similar to the case of Io.

Abstract

Quantifying the variable impacts of wildfire smoke on ozone air quality is challenging. Here we use airborne measurements from the 2018 Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption, and Nitrogen (WE-CAN) to parameterize emissions of reactive nitrogen (NOy) from wildfires into peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN; 37%), NO3 − (27%), and NO (36%) in a global chemistry-climate model with 13 km spatial resolution over the contiguous US. The NOy partitioning, compared with emitting all NOy as NO, reduces model ozone bias in near-fire smoke plumes sampled by the aircraft and enhances ozone downwind by 5–10 ppbv when Canadian smoke plumes travel to Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Texas. Using multi-platform observations, we identify the smoke-influenced days with daily maximum 8-hr average (MDA8) ozone of 70–88 ppbv in Kennewick, Salt Lake City, Denver and Dallas. On these days, wildfire smoke enhanced MDA8 ozone by 5–25 ppbv, through ozone produced remotely during plume transport and locally via interactions of smoke plume with urban emissions.

High in the arid White Mountains of eastern California stand the gnarled, twisted trunks of ancient bristlecone pines. These slow-growing trees quietly weather the ages; at more than 4,000 years old, some are more ancient than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Abstract

In this study, we analyze the spatiotemporal patterns of propagation of pre-monsoon heatwaves and their drivers in India. Using complex networks, we find that heatwaves originate most frequently in northwest India and propagate in the northeast or southeast direction. Heatwaves propagating in the northeast direction have a higher intensity, lower moving distance, smaller areal coverage, and shorter duration than heatwaves moving in the southeast. We find that the larger area and duration of heatwaves propagating southeast are a result of development of larger and more persistent high-pressure systems extending over entire northern and eastern India, which are influenced by El Niño Southern Oscillation. On the other hand, higher radiative fluxes and larger heat entrainment in the boundary layer in the heatwaves propagating northeast contribute to their higher intensities.

Climate change threatens natural ecosystems and socioeconomic systems, with carbon dioxide viewed as the main driving force. To promote ecological civilization construction and cope with global climate change, China first proposed the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals ("dual carbon" goals hereafter) in 2020 and addressed to integrate it into the overall plan of ecological civilization construction in 2021.

Abstract

Ice sheet feedbacks are underrepresented in model assessments of climate sensitivity and their magnitudes are still poorly constrained. We combine a recently published record of Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI) with existing reconstructions of temperature, atmospheric composition, and sea level to estimate both the magnitude and timescale of the ice sheet-albedo feedback since the Last Glacial Maximum. This facilitates the first opportunity to quantify this feedback over the most recent deglaciation using a proxy data-driven approach. We find the ice sheet-albedo feedback to be amplifying, increasing the total climate feedback parameter by 42% and reaching an equilibrium magnitude of 0.55 Wm−2K−1, with a 66% confidence interval of 0.45–0.63 Wm−2K−1. The timescale to equilibrium is estimated as 3.6 ka (66% confidence: 1.9–5.5 ka). These results provide new evidence for the timescale and magnitude of the amplifying ice sheet-albedo feedback that will drive anthropogenic warming for millennia to come.

Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TCs), especially intense TCs, pose serious threats to life and property particularly in the affected coastal regions. Understanding the factors determining the TC intensification rate (IR) remains a great challenge. This study identifies the dominant factors responsible for the observed significant increase in TC IR over the western North Pacific in recent decades using the energetically based dynamical system model of TC intensification. It is found that the environmental dynamical efficiency mainly contributed by vertical wind shear and upper-level divergence is responsible for the long-term changes in TC IR during the strong TC stage, but it played a secondary role in the long-term changes in IR during the weak TC stage. The latter were primarily contributed by the maximum potential intensity, which is primarily determined by sea surface temperature. Results also strongly suggest that global warming is the primary driver of the long-term changes in TC IR.