Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Analyzing The Capabilities Of Frugal Digital Twins For Sustainable Smart City Infrastructure Development In Africa: An ESGS Perspective From Ghana.
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Digital twins, virtual replicas that mirror physical infrastructure through real-time data, have emerged as a pivotal technology for smart city development globally. However, their deployment in developing countries remains constrained by high costs, limited digital infrastructure, and insufficient local expertise. This paper analyses the capabilities of frugal digital twins as enablers of [...]
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 [...]
Detection, Classification, and Characterization of Compound Coastal Flooding along the Gulf and Southeastern U.S. Coasts
Published: 2026-06-09
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 [...]
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: 2026-06-06
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 [...]
Comparing Process-Based and Machine Learning Models for Streamflow Prediction in the Kaligandaki River Basin, Nepal
Published: 2026-06-04
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Water Resource Management
Reliable daily streamflow prediction is critical for hydropower operations, flood risk management, and irrigation planning in monsoon-dominated Himalayan river basins. While both process-based and machine learning (ML) approaches have been used for such tasks, systematic comparisons that decompose the sources of performance differences remain scarce. This study evaluates seven configurations: a [...]
Prioritizing Agricultural Flood Mitigation: A GeoAI-Driven Assessment of Susceptibility, Crop Exposure, and Socioeconomic Vulnerability
Published: 2026-05-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Life Sciences
Flooding is a recurrent hazard across the U.S. Midwest, yet frameworks integrating flood hazard, agricultural exposure, and socioeconomic vulnerability at the county scale remain limited. This study presents a GeoAI-driven agricultural flood risk assessment for all 99 counties in Iowa, combining machine learning-derived flood susceptibility with crop-specific economic exposure and socioeconomic [...]
Development and Evaluation of the High-Resolution MUSICA UK Domain: A Case Study of Global and Regional Biomass Burning Impacts
Published: 2026-05-28
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Regional air quality models provide insights into local pollution and exposure, but limitations in representing large-scale atmospheric processes and long-range transport can introduce inconsistencies across spatial scales, which can be addressed using multi-scale chemical transport models. We develop the first UK-specific regionally refined grid (UKne30×16; ∼7 km), alongside a global uniform [...]
Optimal Modeling and County-Level Applications for the Spatial Prediction of Soil Organic Matter: A Case Study of Thirteen Counties in the Yellow River Basin
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Soil organic matter (SOM) is a key indicator for assessing soil health and the carbon sequestration potential, and its precise spatial prediction is vital for ensuring sustainable agricultural development. Machine learning has emerged as a core tool in digital soil mapping. However, in complex landscapes such as the Yellow River Basin, the selection of models and the translation of their [...]
EGMSpy: an open-source Python toolkit for scalable data handling, classification, clustering, and visualisation of Copernicus EGMS InSAR data
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Geomorphology
The Copernicus European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) provides millimetre-accuracy line-of-sight displacement measurements for over five billion coherent scatterers across Europe, derived from Sentinel-1 SAR interferometry over the period 2015--2023. Despite the unprecedented spatial coverage and measurement density of this dataset, no open-source integrated toolchain exists for processing, [...]
Enhancing the Generalization of Flood Susceptibility Models: A Leakage-Aware Ensemble Framework for Deltaic Landscapes
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Flood susceptibility mapping (FSM) is a cornerstone of disaster risk reduction in low-lying deltaic regions; however, conventional machine learning (ML) applications frequently suffer from spatial data leakage, resulting in inflated performance metrics and unreliable hazard predictions. To address this critical methodological shortcoming, this study develops a robust, leakage-aware ML framework [...]
A research roadmap for assessing the feasibility of warming Mars
Published: 2026-05-05
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Planetary Sciences
This roadmap outlines research pathways to determine whether Mars could be warmed withnon-biological methods. It does not presuppose that warming Mars is desirable; its purposeis to identify what would need to be true for Mars to be warmed, what it would cost, and whatcould go wrong. Three complementary research tracks appear promising. Solid-stategreenhouse membranes offer local warming, aiding [...]
Rules-Based Systems Modeling for Hydropower Forecasting in Multi-Objective Reservoir Systems: Application to California's Central Valley Project
Published: 2026-05-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Hydropower from large multi-objective reservoirs and water management projects constitutes the bulk of global reservoir-based generation. Yet accurate forecasting remains challenging because generation is governed not only by hydrology but by complex institutional rules, environmental regulations, and infrastructure constraints. This study demonstrates that a rules-based systems modeling [...]
Towards Prospective Disaster Risk Management: Mapping Multi-hazard Urban Risk Dynamics Driven by Evolving Exposure and Vulnerability via Earth Observation
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
As local governments increasingly adopt geospatial Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment (CDRA) to inform prospective public policy, the reliability of existing static risk intelligence is challenged by the continuous evolution of building exposure, population distribution, and physical vulnerability. Recent multi-temporal datasets of the built environment, derived from Earth Observation, have [...]
Closing the Duration Gap in RVT: The Energetic Duration
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Duration is a fundamental descriptor of earthquake ground motion, yet it remains ill-defined across engineering seismology, with numerous threshold-based measures adopted for specific applications. This ambiguity has allowed duration to function as a calibration parameter in analyses such as random vibration theory (RVT), where it is often adjusted to match observed response spectra. This paper [...]