Physical Review Research

Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf located In West Antarctica is one of the regions with the fastest rate of climate change. Its climate is affected by oceanic and atmospheric circulations and the ice-shelf interactions with them. In addition to the climate conditions, the ice-shelf behavior also strongly depends on the ice rheological parameters. Using remote-sensing observations, inverse methods and numerical models, this study demonstrates that on multidecadal timescales, climate conditions that determine submarine melting have stronger effects on Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf than its rheological properties.

This work argues, through simplified dynamical systems, that the skill of data-driven climate models critically depends on nonunique choices of coarse-grained representations and stochastic parametrizations. Reduced-order models, tailored to specific scales and processes, are highlighted as valid alternatives to general-purpose emulators. Linear-response theory is proposed as a principled framework to evaluate neural models beyond stationary statistics and to probe causal mechanisms. A “real-world” application is presented by constructing a coarse-grained data-driven model that can be used for causal inference through forced responses.

Researchers combine analytical modeling and finite-element simulations to investigate the dynamics of latent-heat-generated coastal polynyas under steady offshore winds. The work characterizes the spatiotemporal evolution of sea ice concentration and predicts steady-state polynya widths for both straight and curved coastlines.

This work combines ensemble Kalman inversion with calibration, emulation, and sampling to estimate closure parameters and their uncertainties for large-eddy simulations of two-dimensional geophysical turbulence. Across several flow regimes, the optimized parameters remain nearly constant and agree with semianalytical predictions.

Earth’s Hadley, Ferrel, and polar cells resemble the planet’s lungs, with storms, fronts, and eddies analogous to alveoli embedded within them. Using coarse graining as a form of atmospheric “spirometry”, this work maps kinetic-energy exchange between planetary-scale circulation and weather-scale motions, showing alternating geographic bands of upscale and downscale transfer driven by the planetary-scale cells’ convergence and divergence in the troposphere.