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Earthquakes nucleate when large amounts of elastic energy, stored in the earth's crust, are suddenly released due to abrupt sliding over a fault. Fluid injections can reactivate existing seismogenic faults and induce/trigger earthquakes by increasing fluid pressure. Here we develop an analogous experimental system of simultaneously loaded and wetted absorbent porous paper to quantify theoretically the process of wetting‐induced earthquakes. This strategy allows us to gradually release the stored energy by provoking low intensity tremors. We identify the key parameters that control the outcome of the applied injection strategy, which include the initial stress state, fault segmentation, and segment‐activation rate. Subsequent injections, initiated at high stress levels, can drive the system faster toward its instability point, nucleating a large earthquake. Starting at low stress levels, however, they can reduce the magnitude of the natural event by at least one unit. Plain Language Summary: Understanding natural and anthropogenic seismicity is a major scientific challenge. Here we present a novel analogue fault model using absorbent porous paper, which gives new insights on earthquake mitigation. When scaled to in‐situ conditions, the porous paper model represents a natural seismic rupture of magnitude Mw = 5.9. By progressively wetting it, we simulate fluid injections in the earth's crust and draw analogies to large‐scale industrial projects. In our experiments, each injection is accompanied by tremors, which progressively release energy and modify the energy budget of the system. Without precise knowledge of the fault properties, we risk driving the system faster toward an unexpected large seismic event. However, provided that the model's key parameters–fault segmentation, segment‐activation rate, and stress state–are well known or controlled, the natural rupture can be mitigated by at least one unit. We expect that these results will facilitate risk reduction in current fluid injection projects and inspire earthquake mitigation strategies for real tectonic faults. Key Points: From an energetic point of view, absorbent porous paper can be an ideal, low‐cost surrogate rock material for studying induced seismicitySegmentation of faults and sequential fluid injection in each segment can mitigate potential earthquakes by at least one order of magnitudeWe show that fault segmentation, segment‐activation rate and stress state predominantly control the result of applied injection strategies [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lightning channel morphology depends on the thunderstorm cloud charge structure, which in turn is influenced by the thunderstorm dynamics. In this paper, based on three‐dimensional radiation source localization data from the Lightning Mapping Array and radar‐based data, our analysis shows that the overall morphology and detailed morphology of the lightning channel correspond to different eddy dissipation rate (EDR) characteristics. Lightning with complex channel morphology occurs in regions with large EDRs. In single lightning events, channels that extend directly within a certain height range without significant bifurcation and turning tend to propagate in the direction of decreasing EDRs, while channel bifurcations and turns usually occur in regions with large radial velocity gradients and large EDRs. This study shows the relationship between channel morphology and thunderstorm dynamics and provides a new method for the direct application of channel‐level localization data to understand thunderstorm dynamics characteristics. Plain Language Summary: Turbulence in thunderstorms affects the charge distribution, which in turn affects the lightning channel morphology. Thus, the lightning channel morphology can reflect the characteristics of turbulence. The current understanding of the correlation between the two is still limited to the relationship between macroscopic thunderstorm dynamic characteristics and lightning activity. In this paper, the relationship between the morphology of the lightning channel and turbulence characteristics is investigated based on the Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) localization data and the cube root of the eddy dissipation rate (EDR) estimated from KABX radar‐based data. The turbulence strength affects the overall morphology of lightning, and lightning with complex morphology tends to occur in regions with large EDRs. In single lightning events, channels extending directly within a certain altitude range tend to propagate in the direction of decreasing EDRs, and lightning channel bifurcation or turning tends to occur in regions with large EDRs. This paper establishes the relationship between thunderstorm electricity and thunderstorm dynamics by using lightning channel morphology as a bridge and provides a new method for the direct application of channel‐level localization data to understand thunderstorm dynamics characteristics. Key Points: The morphology of lightning channels can reflect the distribution of turbulence intensity, and a certain correlation between the two existDirectly extended lightning channels tend to propagate in the direction of decreasing eddy dissipation ratesThe location of the channel bifurcations or turns often corresponds to regions with high eddy dissipation rates [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in precipitation patterns with climate change could have important impacts on human and natural systems. Zhang et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl092293) report trends in daily precipitation patterns over the last five decades in the western United States, focusing on meteorological drought. They report that dry intervals (calculated at the annual or seasonal level) have increased across much of the southwestern U.S., with statistical assessment suggesting the results are statistically robust. However, Zhang et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl092293) preprocess their annual (or seasonal) averages to compute 5‐year moving window averages before using established statistical techniques for trend analysis that assume independence about some fixed trend. Here we show that the moving window preprocessing violates that independence assumption and inflates the statistical significance of their trend estimates. This raises questions about the robustness of their results. We conclude by discussing the difficulty of adjusting for spatial structure when assessing time trends in a regional context. Plain Language Summary: A recent paper reports trends in drought in the western United States, in particular increases in drought in the southwestern United States, based on changes in the lengths of time intervals without precipitation. In this "comment" we note that the preprocessing approach used in the paper artificially increases the apparent statistical signal in the data and caution that the evidence for the trends reported is not as strong as presented in the paper. We conclude by discussing the difficulty of estimating trends in a statistically rigorous fashion across multiple weather stations. Key Points: Statistical uncertainty about trends in droughts in the southwestern US is larger than reported in a recent GRL letter [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paciorek and Wehner raise important questions around our use of the Mann‐Kendall nonparametric trend test on smoothed data for analyzing long‐term hydrometeorological trends in Zhang et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl092293). We thank them for initiating this important conversation and their gracious cooperation in exploring the issues addressed in their comment. In this reply we confirm the inflation of significant p‐values by our choice to smooth, illustrate the relatively minor impacts on the main conclusions of our paper, and add our voices to those of Paciorek and Wehner in highlighting the lack of methodology for hypothesis testing across multiple stations that have spatial structure (i.e., testing for regionally consistent trends). Plain Language Summary: Our colleagues Drs. Paciorek and Wehner have raised concerns about our paper (Zhang et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl092293), which showed widespread increases in the duration of drought events over the last five decades in the western United States. They point out that our decision to smooth the data using a moving average inflated the number of weather stations at which the trends toward longer droughts were deemed significant by a statistical test. We agree with them on this point, and we have recomputed all our results using unsmoothed data to determine the impacts. We find that for most stations and regions, trend magnitudes remained largely unchanged, with many stations nearby one another often suggesting similar trends. Finally, we agree with Paciorek and Wehner that there is a lack of statistical methods to test such coherent regional patterns, and we caution that over‐reliance on p‐values limits the power of regional data to identify important climate trends. Key Points: We agree that smoothing to 5‐year moving windows introduced serial correlation into time series of annual statistics of daily rainfall data, inflating the number of weather stations individually showing significant trends (p < 0.05) with the Mann‐Kendall testRecomputation with unsmoothed values produced substantially the same dry intervals trend magnitude and direction at most stations individually and had only minimal impacts on dry interval trends computed for National Ecological Observatory Network domains using the Regional Kendall testNo perfect statistical approach leverages the capacity of coherent regional patterns among spatially correlated weather stations, and an over‐reliance on p‐values as a binary (significant vs. insignificant) determinant of trends limits the power of regional data [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fundamental features of one kind of rarely known stratocumulus, which was termed as "Millipede Cloud," occurred over the Eastern Pacific Ocean in 2017 were first documented by using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite imagery. These clouds had long and meandering "central axes" extending from several hundreds to thousands kilometers, and a number of "radical cloud arms" extending several tens of kilometers in its two sides. Total 59 "Millipede Clouds," 4 and 55 of them, were formed over the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres, respectively. Their environmental backgrounds were analyzed by using ERA5 reanalysis data and MODIS sensor Level‐2 data. The cloud top pressures of these "Millipede Clouds" were between 850 and 800 hPa, and their top heights were about 1–2 km. There existed "inversion layer" of air temperature near the cloud tops at 800 hPa, which strongly suggested that these clouds were lower stratocumulus in essence. Plain Language Summary: "Millipede Cloud," one kind of rarely known stratocumulus which looks like "Millipede" shape, is termed for the first time in this paper. It has an obvious "central axis" and a number of well‐organized "radial cloud arms" in two sides of the "central axis" extending in several tens of kilometers length. This paper introduces the fundamental features of "Millipede Clouds" occurred over the Eastern Pacific Ocean in 2017 from the perspective of satellite image. Totally, 59 "Millipede Clouds" were found to occur over the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Their geographic distribution, cloud top features and vertical structure of one typical case on 16 July 2017 were documented. Key Points: The fundamental features of "Millipede Clouds" over the Eastern Pacific Ocean in 2017 were documented by using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite imageryThe environmental backgrounds of these "Millipede Clouds" were analyzed by using ERA5 reanalysis data and MODIS dataThe cloud top pressures of these "Millipede Clouds" are between 850 and 800 hPa, and their top heights are about 1–2 km [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a new concept of using global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals coherently reflected over relatively smooth ocean and ice surfaces from very low elevation angles (below ∼8°) and received by low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to retrieve the tropospheric information. This approach can provide horizontal profiles of tropospheric zenith delay and total column water vapor (TCWV) with centimeter‐level high precision and spatial resolutions of tens of km by ∼1 km, depending on the elevation angle, with a sampling spacing of ∼100 m. This approach can potentially be applied to most sea ice and calm ocean areas and provide tropospheric sensing data, which can complement and augment existing observation systems. A few case studies are conducted in this paper using the Spire grazing‐angle GNSS‐R data. The retrieved TCWV is compared to ERA5 products and the Sentinel‐3 Ocean and Land Color Instrument measurements and shows promising performances. The errors associated with the GNSS‐R tropospheric measurements are also discussed. Plain Language Summary: The atmospheric water vapor is an important component for the weather and climate systems and is difficult to measure, especially over ocean and ice surfaces. This paper studies a new approach to measuring atmospheric water vapor using global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals reflected off ocean and ice surfaces. If the reflection is from a low elevation angle (below ∼8°) and the reflected signal is coherent (all signal rays are reflected in the same direction), this approach can provide very high precision observation of the horizontal gradients of the tropospheric delay and the vertically integrated atmospheric water vapor with good spatial resolutions. This paper presents the methodology of the proposed approach and a few case studies to demonstrate the feasibility and performance by comparing the GNSS‐R retrieved water vapor measurements with models and the Sentinel‐3 satellite radiometry measurements. The errors associated with the GNSS Reflectometry (GNSS‐R) tropospheric measurements are also discussed. Key Points: A new tropospheric sensing concept is studied that relies on coherent‐reflection global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals off ocean and ice surfacesAlgorithms are developed and demonstrated using Spire grazing‐angle GNSS‐R data to retrieve tropospheric delay and water vaporThe presented approach provides high‐precision tropospheric delay and total column water vapor horizontal profiles, as validated using the Sentinel‐3 Ocean and Land Color Instrument data [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracting balanced geostrophic motions (BM) from sea surface height (SSH) observations obtained by wide‐swath altimetry holds great significance in enhancing our understanding of oceanic dynamic processes at submesoscale wavelength. However, SSH observations derived from wide‐swath altimetry are characterized by high spatial resolution while relatively low temporal resolution, thereby posing challenges to extract the BM from a single SSH snapshot. To address this issue, this paper proposes a deep learning model called the BM‐UBM Network, which takes an instantaneous SSH snapshot as input and outputs the projection corresponding to the BM. Training experiments are conducted both in the Gulf Stream and South China Sea, and three metrics are considered to diagnose model's outputs. The favorable results highlight the potential capability of the BM‐UBM Network to process SSH measurements obtained by wide‐swath altimetry. Plain Language Summary: Oceanic dynamic processes can be classified into two categories: balanced geostrophic motions (BM), including large‐scale circulation, mesoscale and submesoscale eddy turbulence, and unbalanced wave motions (UBM), including barotropic tides, and inertia–gravity waves (IGWs). Both types of motions coexist and have respective contributions to the sea surface height (SSH). How to extract the BM from the total SSH observations obtained by satellite altimetry is the crucial problem to be solved in this paper. To tackle this issue, we propose a deep learning model named the BM‐UBM Network to establish the relationship between the total SSH and the BM component. The BM‐UBM Network can generate SSH estimations for the BM when provided with a well‐resolved SSH snapshot. Key Points: A Deep learning model is developed to extract balanced motions from sea surface height snapshot based on a realistic simulationDiagnostics of three metrics reveal the effectiveness of the model in extracting balanced motionsThe model exhibits remarkable advantages over the Gaussian filter (baseline) in capturing the gradient and Laplacian information [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air‐entraining whitecaps provide an important source of bubbles over the global oceans, yet the rate at which the associated air is entrained is not well known. This lack of understanding limits the ability to accurately parameterize bubble‐mediated gas exchange and sea spray aerosol flux. In this paper I present a model to predict the total volume of air entrained by individual whitecaps and extend it to estimate the rate at which air is entrained per unit sea surface area. The model agrees well with existing models and measurements and can be forced by the rate at which energy is dissipated by the wavefield which can be routinely provided by spectral wave models. I then use the model to present the first distributions of the estimated total volume of air entrained by individual whitecaps, as well as their rate of air entrainment and air degassing. Plain Language Summary: The amount of air in the oceans in the form of bubbles at any given time is not well known because of the difficulty associated with making in‐situ measurements. This lack of knowledge inhibits how well ocean‐atmosphere exchange processes that are driven by air and bubbles can be represented in climate models. In this paper, I present a new model to estimate the volume of air entrained by individual breaking waves called whitecaps, as well as how quickly the air is entrained into the oceans and how quickly it leaves the oceans when bubbles rise to the surface and burst. Key Points: A model for the entrainment of air by oceanic whitecaps is presented which agrees well with existing models and measurementsDistributions of the estimated volume of air entrained by individual oceanic whitecaps are presented for the first timeKey uncertainties in the air fraction and entrainment velocities of individual whitecaps remain due to a lack of measurements [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heavy cold ions at Mars are gravitationally bound to the planet unless some process provides energy to them. Observations show that cold (<20 eV) and dense (∼>1 cm−3) O+/O2+ ions with bulk velocities equal to energies ∼1 keV can reach deep into the nightside Martian magnetosheath. These ions are co‐located with a change of the sign of the sunward component of the magnetic field. This magnetic field topology implies the persistence of a localized planetary ions escape channel associated with draped magnetic field lines that are convecting tailward. The observed ion populations propagate approximately in the same direction as surrounding magnetosheath flow and are likely to be almost unheated ionospheric ions from low altitudes. The paper discusses planetary ion energization via Hall electric field originated from ions and electron separation associated with magnetic field curvature. Plain Language Summary: In‐situ observations above the nightside of Mars show the presence of localized dense planetary ion fluxes at altitudes exceeding 2,000 km and escaping from the planet at high energies, comparable to that of the solar wind. These fluxes are accompanied by the reversal of sunward component of magnetic field. Unlike most atmospheric escape channels, the reported phenomenon is characterized by an increase in heavy to light ions density ratio with the distance from the planet at the observed altitudes up to nearly 5,000 km, as well as an increase in overall plasma number density inside this escape channel relative to the ambient sheath environment. This behavior is consistent with acceleration process initiated by a bent magnetic flux tube. Key Points: Ions of different species gain similar energies in the Martian magnetosheath by Hall electric fields associated with magnetic curvatureA high concentration of ionospheric ions correlates with a near void of shocked solar wind protons and a magnetic field reversalNumber density at the reversal increases with distance from Mars in comparison to the surrounding sheath at least till two Martian radii [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The variability of Mars exosphere over monthly to solar‐cycle scales at 251 and 412 km altitude is quantified by analysis of 41‐Ls mean densities derived from precise orbit determination of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey (MO) satellites, respectively. The data encompass 2006–2020 (MRO) and 2002–2020 (MO). At both altitudes, most of the variance is captured by cos(Ls–ϕ), where ϕ ≈ 258°. This term represents the effects of solar heating changes due to the eccentricity of Mars orbit around the Sun, and climatological changes in heating due to lower‐atmosphere dust loading, which does not play a significant role. The remaining variability is connected with the "irregular" variability of solar flux over monthly time scales. For MO, the presence of Helium disrupts a clean correlation with these sources. Plain Language Summary: The force of continuous bombardment of atmospheric particles on a satellite slowly changes its orbit. By tracking the satellite, changes in its orbit can in turn be used to infer atmospheric particle densities. In this paper, we use tracking from NASA's Deep Space Network, an international array of giant antennas, to measure minute orbital changes of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey satellite orbits (and thereby atmospheric densities) around Mars during the 2002–2020 time frame. These data are used to study how the outer regions of Mars atmosphere respond to changes in heating due to solar radation absorption by various chemical species, and by dust that is elevated into the atmosphere by strong winds near the surface. The major finding of this paper is that the variability of Mars outer atmosphere is mainly controlled by solar heating changes due to the eccentricity of Mars orbit around the Sun. Key Points: Densities from precise orbit determination of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey are used to quantify long‐term variability of Mars' exosphereThe annual term is the greatest contributor to total variance, followed by the irregular component of EUV/UV fluxDust‐induced inter‐annual variability is small, but the analysis method does suppress potentially important regional‐scale events [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]