Paper Harvest Report
Date range: April 06, 2026
1 top-tier paper selected out of 69 total publications
Today’s Highlights
A single coastal-ocean paper passed relevance filtering today: Little et al. show in Geophysical Research Letters that standard 1° ocean models fail to reproduce US East Coast sea-level variability because deep coastal bathymetry near Cape Hatteras blocks the southward propagation of coastal-trapped waves. Lowering the depth of near-shore grid cells dramatically improves simulated daily-to-monthly sea level, pointing to a broadly applicable bathymetry-versus-resolution trade-off for coastal climate modeling.
Table of Contents
Top-Tier Journal Papers
Blocked Coastal Propagation Inhibits Model Representation of Southeast United States Coastal Sea Level Variability
Authors: Christopher M. Little, Stephen G. Yeager, Rui M. Ponte, Carmine Donatelli
Journal: Geophysical Research Letters · DOI: 10.1029/2025gl118781
Matched topics: seasonal, coastal
Previous studies indicate that climate models misrepresent southeast United States coastal sea level variability but do not propose a definitive mechanistic explanation. Here, by isolating a mode of variability responsible for the majority of observed nonseasonal United States East Coast (USEC) sea level variance and comparing its representation in ocean models of differing horizontal resolution, we identify a critical role for oceanic coastal propagation. At 1 horizontal resolution, southward propagation of energy is almost entirely blocked by deep coastal bathymetry near Cape Hatteras. Simulation of daily‐to‐monthly USEC sea level at 1 is greatly improved by decreasing the depth of coastal grid cells. It is likely that bathymetry‐induced errors influence the representation of coastal sea level in other locations and over longer time scales. Improvements will require either alterations to bathymetry or higher grid resolution near coastlines.
Statistics
| Metric | Count |
|---|---|
| Journals searched | 11 |
| Total papers fetched | 69 |
| Passed deterministic filter | 6 |
| After LLM relevance filtering | 1 |
| Rejected (not relevant) | 5 |
Papers by journal
| Journal | Papers |
|---|---|
| Geophysical Research Letters | 1 |
Filtering Criteria
Topics: hydrology, hydrologic model, river, runoff, streamflow, reservoir, water management, flood, drought, seasonal, land surface model, climate change, hydropower, surface water, irrigation, earth system model, estuary, coastal, freshwater discharge, river plume, ocean biogeochemistry, marine heatwave, paleohydrology, paleoclimate, Quaternary, Holocene, Pleistocene, fluvial geomorphology, river terrace, loess, drainage network, river capture, landscape evolution, luminescence dating
Fields: engineering, environmental science, computer science, geology, geography