Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Integrating Climate Change into Hydraulic Hazard Assessment: A Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Modeling Approach on the Muto Stream Basin
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
The Mediterranean basin is currently experiencing a profound shift in its climatological baseline, with extreme weather events striking coastal and inland catchments with unprecedented intensity. This changing paradigm forces engineers, hydrologists, and environmental planners to fundamentally rethink how spatial management and infrastructure design are approached. In this paper, we document and [...]
Beyond Black-Box Flood Susceptibility Mapping: An Explainable and Community-Validated GIS-Machine Learning Framework
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Engineering
Floods are among the most destructive natural hazards, causing substantial economic losses, environmental degradation, and threats to human lives worldwide. Although Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and machine learning (ML) have significantly improved flood susceptibility mapping (FSM), many existing models remain difficult to interpret due to their black-box nature, limiting stakeholder [...]
Model and algorithm for constructing a horizon surface in the vicinity of a single fault
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The article addresses the problem of constructing 3D structural models of geological horizons under faulting conditions. The most labor-intensive stage of structural reservoir modeling is the construction of horizon surfaces that must simultaneously fit seismic data and satisfy structural consistency conditions near faults. It is proposed to reduce the problem of recovering the "unreliable" [...]
Dynamic Framework to Quantify Thermal Resiliency and Passive Survivability During Prolonged Air Conditioning Outages in Extreme Hot Climate: Arizona Case Study
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Engineering, Other Engineering
Increasing frequency and severity of extreme heat events, and growing dependence on air-conditioning systems emphasize the need to evaluate thermal resiliency of buildings during cooling outages. Existing thermal resiliency evaluation methodology do not fully capture passive survivability and recovery components. This study aims to develop a comprehensive dynamic framework to evaluate thermal [...]
A Blueprint for Modern Floodplain Management: System Requirements and Architecture for AI-Ready Platforms
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Floodplain managers play a critical role in mitigating flood risks and ensuring compliance with federal, state, and local regulations. Their daily work often depends on a patchwork of standalone tools, manual processes, and legacy systems that have evolved over time to meet regulatory and community needs. To establish a foundation for next-generation technological solutions, we synthesized [...]
Residential Structure-Resolved Fuel Loading for Emissions Estimation in a Wildland–Urban Interface Fire
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Engineering
Fuels in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) include a variety of anthropogenic materials connected to historical and socio-economic backgrounds in addition to biomass. Yet current emission inventories rely on uniform fuel loading factors (FLFs) that treat all structures as compositionally identical. In this study, we develop a structure-resolved combustible fuel inventory for ~5,400 single-family [...]
Machine Learning-Based Sedigraph Reconstruction for Enhanced Sediment Yield Estimation in the Upper Blue Nile Basin
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Sediment-laden runoff in Ethiopia’s Upper Blue Nile Basin (UBNB) threatens the ecological balance of Lake Tana and the operational efficiency of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a critical hydropower infrastructure. High sediment loads, driven by intense monsoon rainfall and erodible soils, exacerbate erosion and sedimentation, affecting water quality and the longevity of [...]
Machine-learning-based classification of shear-band particles in a discrete-element reverse-fault model
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering
Discrete element method (DEM) simulations provide time-resolved particle-scale information on particle motion, contact forces, rotation, and local deformation. However, these outputs are high-dimensional, making it difficult to directly interpret which particle-level descriptors characterize localized deformation. This study develops a machine-learning workflow for classifying shear-band [...]
PSI monitoring of fault zones at the Starobin potash deposit based on Sentinel-1 data
Published: 2026-07-24
Subjects: Engineering
The Starobin potash salt deposit has been mined for over forty years with annual extraction measured in millions of tons. In the vicinity of tectonic fault junction zones, this creates a risk of local technogenic earthquakes caused by fault activation. Local geodetic monitoring within mining allotments is of limited utility for assessing large-scale tectonic deformations, since intense local [...]
Feedback-Controlled Linear Actuator System to Simulate Laboratory Analogs of Landslides
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physics, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
This study describes a scientific apparatus that induces granular flow by tilting an acrylic sample container under user-prescribed constant angular velocity and acceleration profiles. The system consists of a transparent sample container mounted within a motorized frame driven by a linear actuator that we control using pulse-width modulation with feed-forward compensation. Additional components [...]
Solar versus Diesel Powered Water Pumps in Meeting Sustainability Goals in Somalia, a qualitative study
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Somalia endowed with high solar energy is still using diesel energy as the major source of energy to pump drinking water. This put the country under question from achieving SDG 6 which targets universal access to clean and sustainably managed water. Therefore, this study gathers qualitative data from relevant key stakeholders in Puntland, Somalia through individual in-depth interviews and analyze [...]
Multiscale land-atmospheric feedbacks intensify hot droughts over global river-basins
Published: 2026-07-22
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
When drought and heatwave coincide as hot drought, its impacts exceed the sum of individual hazards. The understanding that hot drought intensifies through soil drying is incomplete. We instead find amplification and suppression of hot droughts over both dry and wet soils, with wet (dry) soil-associated amplification (suppression) being the secondary pathway. Moreover, soil-moisture control on [...]
Assessing Predictive Accuracy of Tornado Resilience Models Through Post-event Reconnaissance Data Analysis
Published: 2026-07-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering
Community resilience assessment under a given hazard scenario is commonly performed by representing the building inventory through archetypes and assigning fragility functions for multiple limit states to each archetype. However, because these archetypes and fragility functions may be developed from design provisions, mechanics-based analyses, expert judgment, or historical event data, their [...]
A technical review on underground hydrogen storage potential in porous media: A dynamic reservoir simulation approach
Published: 2026-07-17
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
As the global demand for energy continues to climb and the urgency for carbon-neutral alternatives grows, hydrogen becomes increasingly prominent as a clean energy source [1], [2]. The research reviewed underground hydrogen storage potentials, discussing the distinction between the working gas and cushion gas that are critical in maintaining pressure and optimal injection conditions. Emphasis on [...]
Plastic more than brittle failure may govern standard propagation saw tests
Published: 2026-07-16
Subjects: Engineering
Understanding standard (1 m) propagation saw test (PST) as an invaluable tool for studying failure of snowpacks has remained elusive. Although fracture mechanics theories are commonly applied for interpreting PSTs, recently performed standard PSTs under controlled conditions of slope angle/loading suggest that such theories cannot adequately explain critical cut length measurements vs. slope [...]