Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Multi-scale measurements and temporally resolved modeling of methane emissions at natural gas distribution stations
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Oil, Gas, and Energy
Methane (CH4) emissions from natural gas distribution stations are not well characterized by measurements, contributing to uncertainty in urban emissions inventories and mitigation strategies. We conducted a multi-scale, multi-temporal study of four distribution stations in Calgary, Alberta, combining component- and facility-level measurements with modeling to quantify, attribute, and compare [...]
Ground Motion Model Incorporating Azimuthal Dependence on Topographic Effects in Japan
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Engineering
Conventional topographic terms in ground motion models (GMMs) typically characterize topographic effects using site-specific parameters such as relative elevation, curvature, or slope. This study demonstrates that topographic response is influenced by source-to-site geometry, specifically the incidence direction with respect to the slope aspect. Utilizing 15,189 records from 641 Kiban–Kyoshin [...]
FloodOps Twin: A Role-Based Spatial Intelligence Digital Twin for Reducing Cognitive Overload in Urban Flood Emergency Operations
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Engineering
Rapid-onset urban flooding generates significant operational challenges for Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs), where decision-makers must interpret large volumes of heterogeneous hydrological, infrastructural, and transportation data under severe time constraints. Existing flood dashboards frequently rely on centralized visualization paradigms that expose all users to the same high-density [...]
Modeling Flood Risk Communication and Evacuation Dynamics Using an Agent-Based Framework: A Cedar Rapids, Iowa Case Study
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Engineering
The benefits of effective flood-risk communication in urban river basins are reliant upon the timing of warnings with respect to flood evolution and challenges encountered by vulnerable populations. However, these benefits can reduce losses substantially. This study presents a geospatial agent-based model of flood evacuation for Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The model accounts for stage-specific flood [...]
Spectrally structured CNN encoding for interpretable and edgeready fractional vegetation cover mapping using UAS multispectral and imaging spectroscopy
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biogeochemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing
Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is a key indicator of semi-arid ecosystem condition, but non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) remains difficult to map because dry or senescent vegetation, litter, woody debris, and standing dead material can overlap spectrally with photosynthetic vegetation (PV) and bare ground (BE), especially where shadows, exposed bare earth surfaces, and mixed vegetation-soil [...]
Microbial growth inhibition by compacted bentonite after an 8.5-year in-situ incubation
Published: 2026-06-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Compacted bentonite in future deep geological repositories for the disposal of nuclear waste will create an extreme, energy-limited environment for microorganisms, yet the long-term implications for microbial community structure and the potential emergence of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) remain uncertain. Here, we use an 8.5-year in-situ incubation experiment in an anoxic Opalinus Clay [...]
Improving Integrated Vapour Transport Forecasts over the Himalayas Using a Convolutional Neural Network for Better Atmospheric River Prediction
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Engineering
Extreme precipitation over the Himalayas is often linked to Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) interacting with its unique and complex topography. The topographic complexity and sparse observational data pose a challenge for numerical weather prediction models. We find that the widely used Global Forecast System (GFS) exhibits systematic errors in high-magnitude Integrated Vapor Transport (IVT), and its [...]
Flexocompression Beam Analogy Applied to the Calculation of Seismogenic Thickness and Cortical Rupture Prediction
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Education, Engineering
This paper presents a deterministic geomechanical model to parameterize the spatial variability of seismogenic thickness (h) in basement thrust faults under flat-slab subduction regimes. We develop a physico-mathematical analogy by transforming the elemental elastic approximation into a variable cross-section Timoshenko beam model subjected to tectonic flexocompression. The governing differential [...]
Analytical prediction of active-layer thaw and subsidence under seasonal thermal forcing: application to Svalbard permafrost
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Seasonal thaw of the active layer and the resulting ground subsidence strongly influence Arctic hydrology, soil-carbon release, and the stability of northern infrastructure. Lunardini (1987) derived an exact similarity solution for one-dimensional thaw in frozen soil that consolidates as it thaws. Although physically elegant, the solution has remained difficult to use in practice: usable limiting [...]
Dynamic Line Rating and Residual Congestion: Implications for Storage Sizing and Availability
Published: 2026-06-26
Subjects: Engineering
Creating story lines on floods: relating climate-change uplift to (extreme) experienced and future flooding events
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Fluvial flooding remains one of the most significant climate-related hazards worldwide, with its impacts intensified by increasing urbanisation, land-use change, and climate change. We apply the flood-excess volume (FEV) methodology to analyse major recent flood events on the River Aire in Leeds, UK, and specifically to the 2015 Boxing Day and February 2020 floods, as a basis for evaluating the [...]
Detecting Harmful Algal Blooms in the Gulf of Maine using a Hybrid Model
Published: 2026-06-22
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Harmful algal blooms are a growing threat to marine ecosystems, aquaculture, public health and tourism industries. This study quantifies the value of augmenting simulated outputs of a regional hydrodynamic model with satellite data input to detect harmful algal blooms using machine learning model in Gulf of Maine. And evaluates performance using in-situ Imaging FlowCytobot observations spanning [...]
AEF-Econ: Toward Plug-and-Play Socioeconomic Foundation Embeddings from AlphaEarth for Urban Remote Sensing
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) unify global remote sensing foundation embeddings through multimodal self-supervised learning, but their pretraining focuses on physical land-surface signals, limiting plug-and-play use in socioeconomic tasks. We integrate seven heterogeneous data streams across 36 Chinese cities over eight years—AEF embeddings, population, nighttime lights, remote sensing indices, [...]
Lead contamination from shooting activities: bioavailability, bioaccessibility and hydrological controls on Pb geochemical partitioning in soil
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences
Lead (Pb) contamination in soils is a persistent environmental and human health concern in areas affected by shooting activities. This study provides an integrated assessment of Pb geochemical behaviour, plant interactions, and human bioaccessibility in waterlogged alluvial wetland soils from Soglitelle (southern Italy), a natural reserve historically impacted by hunting activities. The results [...]
Development of Hydraulic Hazard Mapping within a GIS Environment: Interoperability Between HEC-RAS and QGIS
Published: 2026-06-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Alluvial events represent some of the most destructive natural hazards threatening human civilization. Over recent decades, the frequency of extreme rainfall has exposed the Italian territory to periodic and highly damaging inundations, resulting in a dramatic escalation of financial losses and mortality rates. In regions such as Sicily, several industrial and artisanal clusters are strategically [...]