Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Coastal Aquifer Energy in Plymouth, UK
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Plymouth, UK, is a city underlain by a coastal karstic aquifer system, impacted by saline intrusion. The aquifer is being investigated as a source of ambient water for a city-wide heat network. Findings of aquifer-energy pumping tests are reported, highlighting the arising opportunities and challenges. The concept presented here deviates from typical aquifer energy systems, in that thermally [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Identifying Lead Components in Uganda’s Water Infrastructure Supply: A Supply Chain Mapping and Intervention-Identifying Analysis
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lead (Pb) exposure through drinking water causes a substantive preventable disease burden. The primary source of Pb in drinking water is through Pb-containing infrastructure, including leaded-brass fittings, galvanized iron/steel pipes, and some plastics. As the source of Pb through drinking water is widely known, its prevention through a supply chain intervention is possible. This is true in [...]
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 [...]
LSDetector: An Open-Source Tool Bridging Landslide Detection Models and Practical Deployment through Three-Stage Transfer Learning
Published: 2026-07-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering
Rapid and reusable landslide detection from remote-sensing imagery remains challenging because practical deployment often requires cross-region transfer learning, limited local labels, and reproducible model-to-product workflows. This paper presents LSDetector, an open-source local workbench that bridges advanced landslide detection models and real-world deployment through three-stage transfer [...]
Stormwater storage among remnant, degraded and restored urban prairies and wetlands of varying ecological quality
Published: 2026-07-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
In response to increasing intensification of land use and more frequent and severe flooding, urban green spaces and natural areas are being relied upon to provide additional stormwater storage. Natural grasslands and wetlands provide extensive ecosystem services, including stormwater storage. These types of ecosystems were once widespread across the globe, but much of this habitat has been lost [...]
SWMMCanada: An Open-Source Service for Generating Ready-to-Run Urban Drainage Models Across Canada
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydrology, Software Engineering
Urban stormwater modelling is often slowed more by data preparation than by the simulation itself, because rainfall, terrain, land cover, soil, and pipe network data usually come from different agencies, formats, projections, and data structures. This software paper presents SWMMCanada, an open source and standardized model building service that makes Canadian urban hydrological modelling easier [...]
Quantifying Watershed Criticality via Deep Learning and Explainable AI for Groundwater Resilience
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Groundwater is a vital freshwater resource that supports drinking water supply, agricultural sustainability, ecosystem functioning, and drought resilience. As water scarcity and climate change impacts intensify, sustainable groundwater management plays an important role in groundwater management, with groundwater storage (GWS) acting as a key indicator of groundwater resilience. This study [...]
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 [...]
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: 2026-06-08
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 [...]
Automated GIS-Based Hydrological Modeling Framework for Flood Hydrograph Estimation in Ungauged Mediterranean Catchments: A Case Study of Sicily
Published: 2026-06-06
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 [...]