Paper Harvest Report

Date range: March 30, 2026

4 top-tier papers selected out of 82 total publications

Today’s Highlights

A BAMS study demonstrates that machine-learning climate emulators can generate huge (10,560-year) ensembles suitable for estimating Probable Maximum Precipitation and other very extreme quantiles across the contiguous U.S. A Nature Communications analysis links explosive tropical volcanic eruptions to concurrent summer droughts across South and northern East Asia via a circumglobal Rossby-wave teleconnection, while a second Nature Communications paper shows that although a warming climate makes tropical cyclones less likely to stall, their daily rainfall intensifies—particularly over land and nearshore regions.

Today’s Highlights
Top-Tier Journal Papers
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1. Papers by journal
Filtering Criteria

Top-Tier Journal Papers

Quantifying Very Extreme Precipitation and Temperature Using Huge Ensembles Generated by Machine Learning-based Climate Model Emulators

Authors: Christopher J. Paciorek, Daniel Cooley

Journal: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · DOI: 10.1175/bams-d-25-0178.1

Matched topics: climate change

Weather extremes produce major impacts on society and ecosystems and are likely to change in likelihood and magnitude with climate change. However, very low probability events are hard to characterize statistically using observations or even climate model output because of short records/runs. For precipitation, consideration of such events arises in quantifying Probable Maximum Precipitation (PMP), namely estimating extreme precipitation magnitudes for designing and assessing critical infrastructure. A recent National Academies report on modernizing PMP estimation proposed using very large climate model-based ensembles to estimate extreme quantiles, possibly through machine learning-based ensemble boosting. Here we assess statistical aspects of such an approach for the contiguous United States using a huge ensemble (10560 years) produced by a state-of-the-art emulator (ACE2) trained on ERA5 reanalysis. The results indicate that one can practically estimate very extreme precipitation and temperature quantiles, provided one uses appropriate statistical extreme value techniques. More specifically, the results provide evidence for (1) the use of threshold-exceedance methods with a sufficiently high threshold (necessary for precipitation) for reliable estimation, (2) the robustness of results to variation in extremes by season and storm type, and (3) the sufficiency of the ensemble for well-constrained statistical uncertainty. Our results also show that the emulator produces extremes outside the range of the ERA5 training data. While encouraging for emulators’ potential use for quantifying the climatology of extremes, more investigation is needed to assess whether emulators are fit for this purpose. Our focus is on how to use huge ensembles to estimate very extreme statistics; we expect the results to be relevant for future improved emulators.

Tropical volcanism triggers pan-Asian monsoon droughts via circumglobal teleconnection

Authors: Wenzheng Nie, Jun Xia, Kanon Kino, Dunxian She, Taikan Oki

Journal: Nature Communications · DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-70710-x

Matched topics: drought

Explosive tropical volcanic eruptions can trigger widespread hydroclimate anomalies across Eurasia, yet the underlying dynamical pathways remain poorly understood. Here we show that large tropical eruptions consistently induce concurrent summer droughts over South Asia and northern East Asia during the past millennium, as revealed by proxy records and climate model simulations. Volcanically induced suppression of monsoon convection over South Asia reduces diabatic heating, exciting a Rossby wave response resembling the negative phase of the circumglobal teleconnection (CGT). This upper-tropospheric anomaly, robust across tropical ocean states, promotes northerly winds and strong subsidence that suppress rainfall over northern East Asia. The CGT-like teleconnection is robustly reproduced across tree-ring-based CGT reconstructions, last-millennium climate simulations, and idealized modeling experiments. Our findings identify a previously underappreciated volcanic–CGT–drought linkage, offering insights into the predictability of continental-scale climate anomalies under external forcing.

Global stalled tropical cyclones in a changing climate

Authors: Zifeng Deng, Gabriele Villarini, Wenchang Yang, Gabriel A. Vecchi, Zhaoli Wang

Journal: Nature Communications · DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71320-3

Matched topics: river

Tropical cyclone (TC) stalling refers to a storm wandering within a relatively small region. When TC stalling occurs, localized accumulated damage can increase substantially. However, the understanding of this special behavior globally, especially its response to climate warming, remains limited. Here, we provide a comprehensive global analysis of TC stalling and its response to climate warming, utilizing both observational data and climate model simulations. Our results reveal a distinct hemispheric asymmetry, showing that basins in the Southern Hemisphere are more prone to TC stalling than those in the Northern Hemisphere. Although a warming climate reduces the global probability of TC stalling occurrence, it significantly increases the daily rainfall by these storms, particularly over land and nearshore regions. Our analysis also indicates that, although the main drivers for the stalling vary in different basins, in general, they are mainly influenced by the steering wind vector (magnitude and direction) and TC location. Furthermore, changes in probability of TC stalling in climate warming are mainly affected by changes in the probability of TC exposure to a weak steering flow.

Influence of Lateral Input of Sediments on Longitudinal Luminescence Signal in a River (Rakaia River, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Authors: Louise Karman‐Besson, Anne Guyez, Arindam Biswas, Svenja Riedesel, Marius Allèbe, Dominik Brill et al.

Journal: Geophysical Research Letters · DOI: 10.1029/2025gl119886

Matched topics: river

Rivers transport sediments from mountains to oceans, shaping landscapes and transmitting environmental signals. This transfer is repeatedly interrupted by storage and remobilization, complicating efforts to reconstruct erosion histories. Luminescence‐based methods, which exploit the progressive zeroing of the luminescence signals (bleaching) during transport, offer a new way to quantify sediment transit. Existing approaches, however, assume negligible lateral inputs, predicting a simple downstream decrease in luminescence signal intensity. We present new data from the Rakaia River, New Zealand Aotearoa, where observed downstream patterns deviate from such predictions and suggest an influence of local sediment supply. By using a stochastic transport‐storage model that incorporates continuous and localized inputs, we show that downstream signals reflect the balance between supply and bleaching efficiency, producing bleaching‐ or supply dominated regimes. These results demonstrate that luminescence‐based sediment tracing not only capture sediment transport dynamics in rivers but also their supply from hillslope erosion.

Statistics

Metric	Count
Journals searched	11
Total papers fetched	82
Passed deterministic filter	11
After LLM relevance filtering	4
Rejected (not relevant)	7

Papers by journal

Journal	Papers
Nature Communications	2
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society	1
Geophysical Research Letters	1

Filtering Criteria

Topics: flood, drought, river, reservoir, streamflow, runoff, precipitation, rainfall, groundwater, watershed, catchment, hydrology, hydrologic, hydraulic, water resources, water management, water quality, dam, levee, irrigation, hydropower, snow, glacier, ice sheet, permafrost, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, land surface, climate change, sea level, seasonal, El Nino, ENSO

Fields: Hydrology, Environmental Science, Geography, Geology