Preprints
Filtering by Subject: 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 [...]
GSDD, A Catchment-Scale Global Streamflow Drought Database based on Observed Daily Discharge
Published: 2026-06-13
Subjects: Engineering
Streamflow droughts increasingly threaten global water security, hydropower production, and freshwater ecosystems. Understanding observed streamflow drought characteristics is key to water supply management, energy and food production. However, global drought datasets primarily rely on meteorological indicators (e.g., precipitation and evapotranspiration), while a few offers grid-based [...]
Permafrost Degradation and Ecological Restoration Technologies in the Northeastern Margin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: A Case Study of Xining and Surrounding Areas
Published: 2026-06-13
Subjects: Engineering
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau represents the highest-altitude and largest-area permafrost distribution zone in global mid-to-low latitude regions. Its northeastern margin, encompassing Xining City and surrounding areas, constitutes a critical transitional zone where seasonal permafrost and perennial permafrost interweave. Driven by the dual forces of global climate warming and anthropogenic [...]
Shifting Patterns of Summer Humid Heatwaves Highlight Growing Threat over South Asia and Middle East–North Africa
Published: 2026-06-11
Subjects: Engineering
Humid heatwaves (HHWs), marked by elevated heat−high moisture compounding, are increasingly concerning for sustainable development in South-Asia (SAS) and the Middle East–North Africa (MENA). We examine the spatiotemporal compounding of HHWs during summer (March−August) across 268 urban and peri-urban sites within the IPCC–reference regions in the SAS and MENA using in-situ observations. We [...]
A Rotating Air-Ring Model for Atmospheric Vortices and a Peripheral Drag Concept for Tornado Mitigation
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This study introduces Latent Angular Momentum (LAM) as a heuristic parameter for understanding the intensification of rotating atmospheric vortices. Using a simplified air-ring model based on the conservation of angular momentum, we derive an analytical expression for tangential wind speed as a function of radial contraction and latitude. Model predictions yield physically plausible initial radii [...]
When the Comparison Is the Problem: Spatial Resolution and Validation Bias in InSAR-Derived Coastal Subsidence Assessments Along the U.S. Gulf Coast
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Engineering
Li et al. (2026) compare two InSAR-derived surface-elevation change datasets for the central U.S. Gulf Coast and conclude that InSAR is unreliable in vegetated coastal settings for rates below 5 mm/yr. While InSAR reproducibility is a timely and consequential question, we demonstrate that the paper's principal conclusions rest on three methodological decisions that critically undermine the [...]
Detection, Classification, and Characterization of Compound Coastal Flooding along the Gulf and Southeastern U.S. Coasts
Published: 2026-06-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Compound coastal flooding, driven by the concurrent or sequential exceedance of storm surge and river discharge thresholds, poses disproportionate risk to Gulf and Southeast US coastal communities, yet systematic observation-based characterization of its spatial distribution, typological structure, and joint intensity remains limited. This study investigates compound coastal flooding using a [...]
Uncovering a hidden resource for wildfire resilience: groundwater governance solutions to social-ecological challenges in a warming world
Published: 2026-06-08
Subjects: Engineering
Wildfires are intensifying worldwide and increasingly threaten cities and communities in the wildland–urban interface. While attention has focused on forests, fuels, and firefighting capacity, water systems are also under growing pressure during major fire events. Groundwater, accessed through decentralized wells across urban, peri-urban, and rural landscapes, remains largely overlooked in [...]
Automated GIS-Based Hydrological Modeling Framework for Flood Hydrograph Estimation in Ungauged Mediterranean Catchments: A Case Study of Sicily
Published: 2026-06-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
The estimation of design flood hydrographs in ungauged Mediterranean catchments remains a persistent challenge for hydrological engineering, flood hazard assessment, and territorial risk planning. The absence of discharge observations, coupled with the high temporal concentration of precipitation and the marked geomorphological variability of small basins, renders conventional calibration-based [...]
Two decades of kilometer-scale daily PM2.5 from satellite observations and machine learning reveal geographically diverging exposure in Ghana
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a major contributor to global burden of disease, yet air quality data remain sparse in many low- and middle-income countries, limiting nationwide monitoring and effective policy development. We address this gap by developing a high-resolution gridded (1 km × 1 km) dataset for daily surface PM2.5 concentrations in Ghana from 2005 to 2025 by training [...]
Improving sub seasonal streamflow prediction for hydrological drought forecasting using machine learning in the Rhine River basin in the Netherlands
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Engineering
Accurate sub seasonal streamflow forecasts are essential for hydrological drought preparedness in large river basins with competing water demands. Traditional process based hydrological models often struggle to represent non linear, non stationary catchment behavior under changing climate and land use conditions. In this study, we develop Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks to improve sub [...]