Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Drought Intelligence Explorer: a 45-year district-level dataset of ten drought indicators for India and an open analytical platform
Published: 2026-11-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography
Publicly available drought records for India rarely combine sub-national detail, multi-decadal coverage, several indicator families and a documented processing chain in one citable product. Here we present a monthly, district-level dataset of ten drought indicators covering all of India from January 1981 to December 2025, together with the open, browser-based platform that serves it. Four of the [...]
GeoPFN: subsecond geological field reconstruction with constrained uncertainty maps
Published: 2026-11-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Characterising spatially variable geological fields from sparse, noisy measurements remains challenging, particularly where abrupt geological contacts occur between sensors. This study presents GeoPFN, a prior-data fitted network that reconstructs clean hydraulic conductivity and pointwise predictive uncertainty from readings on irregular sensor layouts and a supplied noise level in less than a [...]
A Thermodynamic Framework for Quantifying Firn Thermal Evolution: Cold Content Depletion, Energy Barrier Reduction and Thermal Commitment of Austfonna Ice Cap, Svalbard (2009-2022)
Published: 2026-11-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Svalbard is warming several times faster than the global mean, yet most glaciological studies characterise firn thermal change through temperature trends alone rather than the underlying thermodynamic state. This study develops a linked diagnostic framework, cold content (CCcol), energy barrier (EBrelative), advective Péclet number (Peadv), and thermal relaxation time (τ) and applies it to a [...]
Global news reports reveal the human dimensions of water scarcity
Published: 2026-11-05
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Water scarcity has conventionally been estimated using hydrologic models that quantify pressure on water resources. Yet hydrologic stress does not necessarily translate into water shortages, as human adaptation can buffer physical constraints while infrastructure and institutional failures can create scarcity even where water is abundant. Here, we use large language models to identify news [...]
Instantaneous State InSAR: Smoothness Doublet and Ambiguity Resolution
Published: 2026-11-03
Subjects: Engineering
Instantaneous state InSAR (ISI) enables epoch-wise parameterization, estimation and prediction for the dynamic motion of individual scatterers in near real-time displacement monitoring. Yet, it introduces a coupling problem: the state prediction (time-update) and the integer ambiguity resolution of double difference phase (measurement-update) depend on each other in a recursive loop. An [...]
Advances in UAV-Based Methane Emission Monitoring: Sensors, Sampling Geometry, and Quantification
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one key platforms for monitoring methane due to their flexible deployment with spatial scales between ground-based sensors and crewed aircraft This review synthesises research on UAV sensing technologies, flight and sampling strategies, quantification methods, and validation practices. It finds that quantitative performance depends on the combined choice of [...]
Conditional Benefits of Point-Level UAV LiDAR--Multispectral Fusion for 3D Vegetation Classification
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Multisensor remote-sensing fusion combines complementary measurements of landscape structure and surface reflectance, but adding a second modality does not necessarily produce uniform classification gains. This study evaluates point-level data fusion of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) LiDAR and multispectral imagery within a three-dimensional (3D) point-cloud representation. Tree--shrub [...]
Treatment of Contaminated Water from the Oil Industry Using Electrocoagulation: A Bibliometric Analysis
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Engineering
This review article presents a bibliometric analysis aimed at examining recent advances in the treatment of contaminated water from the oil industry using electrocoagulation (EC), evaluating the operational parameters that influence removal efficiency. A bibliometric analysis and a systematic review were conducted on 80 experimental articles (2021–2026) retrieved from Scopus. VOSviewer (threshold [...]
Seasonal hydropower forecast framework using a combination of deep learning and physics-based methods
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Engineering
Seasonal hydropower forecasts can inform power-system resource adequacy, but uncertainty propagates through climate, hydrologic, routing, water-management, and generation components.We develop a regional planning prototype linking North American Multi-Model Ensemble seasonal forecasts, Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) downscaling, an uncertainty-aware long short-term memory runoff model based on [...]
Role of Topo-Climatic Factors in Landslide Susceptibility Mapping: A Machine Learning Perspective
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Engineering
With the rapid growth of machine learning (ML) applications in landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM), many studies have relied on large and diverse datasets to improve predictive performance. However, in data-scarce regions, model transferability becomes challenging, and not all input variables contribute meaningful information to landslide prediction, leading to the well-known problem of [...]
Characterising Methane Concentration Variability at Coal Stockpiles in a Surface Coal Mine
Published: 2026-10-29
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The spatiotemporal variability of atmospheric methane concentration at surface coal mines remains insufficiently characterised. The impact of local meteorology and mining activities on methane emission have not yet been fully evaluated. In this study, ground observations of the methane concentration along with meteorology were carried out around coal stockpiles (CSP) in an active surface coal [...]
The Invisible Depletion: Compound Drought, Groundwater Collapse, and Maladaptation in the Middle East and Southwest Asia
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Engineering, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
The Middle East and Southwest Asia (MESWA) region is experiencing severe hydro-climatic non-stationarity, transitioning from cyclical precipitation deficits and surpluses to a state of structural water bankruptcy. This review synthesizes the compounding atmospheric and anthropogenic drivers of this crisis, highlighting the region’s shift towards a regime defined by frequent, concurrent extremes [...]
Erosion-induced momentum production and system acceleration govern landslide mobility
Published: 2026-10-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Geotechnical Engineering, Glaciology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Sedimentology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Erosion can fundamentally alter landslide acceleration through the produced momentum. However, existing analytical landslide velocity models do not account for the energy dissipation associated with erosion-induced system acceleration. Here, I present a novel, complete dynamical velocity model for erosive landslides that incorporates two intrinsically coupled mechanically essential processes: [...]
A multi-source quantitative reconstruction of the 26 August 2026 Bhote Koshi rock-ice avalanche-debris-flow-flood cascade, Nepal
Published: 2026-10-26
Subjects: Engineering
On 26 August 2026, a catastrophic transboundary mass-flow and flood cascade originated in the upper Lhende Khola-Bhote Koshi headwaters and propagated through the Bhote Koshi, Trishuli, and Narayani river system in Nepal. Early public descriptions used the glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) label, but subsequent seismic, satellite, video, field, hydrological, and damage-assessment evidence [...]
Data-efficient prediction of rare earth leaching from industrial residues with physics-constrained machine learning
Published: 2026-10-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geochemistry, Mining Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Coal ash, mine-water sludge, red mud and phosphogypsum contain rare earth elements, and each new feedstock needs its own leaching recipe. LixaLearn couples a small neural network to closed-form rate laws for four metal hosts (exchange sites, fast-dissolving minerals, slow-dissolving minerals and a locked fraction), with part of the fast host limited by the solubility of its mineral. The network [...]