As Earth’s climate warms, cyclone intensity and rain may increase. Cyclones, like hurricanes, gain strength from warm ocean waters. Understanding how oceans react to strong winds is vital. We highlight ocean responses to pre-storm salinity. Changes in salinity affect oceans during storms: salinity rises, temperature falls, and density increases. We suggest that mixing of near-surface with deeper water may impact heat exchange between the ocean and atmosphere during and after a weather event.

We have developed a methodology for the bias correction of simulated river runoff to force ocean models in which low, medium, and high discharges are corrected once separated at the coast. We show that the bias correction generally leads to an improved representation of river runoff in Europe. The methodology is suitable for model regions with a sufficiently high coverage of discharge observations, and it can be applied to river runoff based on climate hindcasts or climate change simulations.

Understanding how waves and currents interact helps us comprehend physical processes occurring in a coastal environment. In the present work, waves and currents were reproduced in the laboratory and flow velocities were measured. Results showed that the superposition of waves induces a cyclic enhancement or suppression of near-bed turbulence, and, depending on current velocity, wave orbital velocity, and bed roughness, waves can alter the current velocity, following highly nonlinear patterns.