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.

Identifying tide–surge interaction (TSI) is a complex task. We enhance existing statistical methods with a more-robust test that accounts for complex tides. We also develop a semi-empirical model to investigate the influence of one mechanism of TSI, tidal-phase alteration. We apply these techniques to tide-gauge records from Singapore and the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. We find TSI at all studied locations: tidal-phase alteration can change the timing of large surges.

Here we show the development of high-resolution simulations of storm surge in the northern Adriatic Sea employing different atmospheric forcing data and physical configurations. Traditional metrics favor a simulation forced by a coarser database and employing a less sophisticated setup. Closer examination allows us to identify a baroclinic model forced by a high-resolution dataset as being better able to capture the variability and peak values of the storm surge.

We employed a gradient-based algorithm to identify the position and intensity of the fronts in a coastal sea using sea surface temperature data, thereby quantifying their variations. Our study provides a comprehensive analysis of these fronts, elucidating their seasonal variability, intra-tidal dynamics, and the influence of winds on the fronts. By capturing the temporal and spatial dynamics of these fronts, our understanding of the complex oceanographic processes within this region is enhanced.

We focus on understanding the impact of river runoff and precipitation on sea surface salinity (SSS) in the eastern North Tropical Atlantic (e-NTA) region off northwestern Africa. By analyzing regional simulations and observational data, we find that river flows significantly influence SSS variability, particularly after the rainy season. Our findings underscore that a main source of uncertainty representing SSS variability in this region is from river runoff estimates.

Most satellite observations have gaps, for example, due to clouds. This paper presents a method to reconstruct missing data in satellite observations of the chlorophyll a concentration in the Black Sea. Rather than giving a single possible reconstructed field, the discussed method provides an ensemble of possible reconstructions using a generative neural network. The resulting ensemble is validated using techniques from numerical weather prediction and ocean modelling.

Recent studies have highlighted the potential vulnerability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to atmospheric and oceanic changes. We present new insights from observations from three oceanic moorings below Fimbulisen Ice Shelf from 2009 to 2023. We find that relatively warm water masses reach below the ice shelf both close to the surface and at depth with implications for the basal melting of Fimbulisen.

Transient Attracting Profiles (TRAPs) indicate the most attracting regions of the flow and have the potential to facilitate offshore cleanups in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We study the characteristics of TRAPs and the prospects for predicting debris transport from a mesoscale-permitting dataset. Our findings show the relevance of TRAP lifetime estimations to an operational application, and our TRAP tracking algorithm may even benefit other challenges that are related to search at sea.

In this paper, we use a high-resolution regional ocean model to downscale seasonal ocean forecasts from the Seamless System for Prediction and EArth System Research (SPEAR) model of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). We find that the downscaled model has significantly higher prediction skill in many cases.

We use simulations of our ocean forecasting system to compare the impact of additional altimeter observations from two proposed future satellite constellations. We found that, in our system, an altimeter constellation of 12 nadir altimeters produces improved predictions of sea surface height, surface currents, temperature, and salinity compared to a constellation of 2 wide-swath altimeters.

The diel vertical migration (DVM) of zooplankton is one of the largest species migrations to occur globally and is a key driver of regional ecosystems. Here, time series of acoustic data collected at the circumpolar Arctic polynya system were used to examine the annual cycle of DVM. We revealed that the formation of polynya open water disrupts DVM. This disruption is attributed to a predator avoidance behavior of zooplankton in response to higher polar cod abundance attracted by the polynya.

Understanding the flow of the Levantine Sea surface current is not straightforward. We propose a study based on learning techniques to follow interactions between water near the shore and further out at sea. Our results show changes in the coastal currents past 33.8° E, with frequent instances of water breaking away along the Lebanese coast. These events happen quickly and sometimes lead to long-lasting eddies. This study underscores the need for direct observations to improve our knowledge.