Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Data-driven control reveals distributed flood adaptation priorities across large river networks under climate change
Published: 2026-02-24
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dynamical Systems, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
Distributed flood adaptation requires knowing where in a river network attenuation effort should concentrate and how much each reach requires, but the spatial coupling, scenario dependence, and high dimensionality of real drainage networks have kept these requirements largely unresolved. We combine data-driven dynamics learning, reduced-order modeling, and optimal control theory into a diagnostic [...]
Machine Learning and Explainable AI for Agricultural Drought Prediction: A Comparative Analysis of Gradient Boosting Methods Using Multi-Source Earth Observation Data
Published: 2026-02-21
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Life Sciences
Drought monitoring and prediction remain critical challenges in climate science and agricultural management, particularly under accelerating climate change. This study presents a comprehensive machine learning framework for drought susceptibility mapping in Iowa, USA, using multi-source Earth observation data and explainable artificial intelligence. We systematically evaluated eleven supervised [...]
Biochar granulation and particle size influence hydrological performance of green roof substrates
Published: 2026-02-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Materials Science and Engineering, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Green roofs are increasingly being implemented in cities to improve stormwater management and provide additional ecosystem services. Biochar, a carbon-rich material derived from pyrolyzed biomass, has emerged as a promising substrate additive to improve hydrological performance of green roofs; however, unprocessed biochar is susceptible to erosion loss. Biochar granulation and particle size [...]
Directional Peak Factors of Strong-Motion Response Spectra: A Stochastic Field Representation on the Circle
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Structural Engineering
Directional variability in horizontal earthquake ground motions is often addressed using orientation-independent intensity measures obtained by rotating the two horizontal components and summarizing the resulting response spectra. In contrast, the stochastic structure of directional peak factors, which connect second-order response measures to extreme response levels, has received limited [...]
Rotation-Invariant Ground-Motion as Directional Selection Operators: A Closed-Form Framework for RotD Response Spectra
Published: 2026-02-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering
Horizontal earthquake ground motion is inherently two-dimensional, yet most engineering applications rely on scalar intensity measures. Rotation-invariant response spectra such as RotD50, MaxRotD50, and RotD100 are widely used to remove dependence on sensor orientation. They are often treated as direction-free scalars, which they are not. In this study, directional pseudo-spectral acceleration is [...]
Extraction and re-implementation of SWAT-Model calculations under the MAELIA platform in order to simulate the socio-environmental impacts of norms
Published: 2026-02-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
MAELIA (Multi-Agent for EnvironmentaL norms Impact Assesment) is an agent-based simulation platform designed to assess the impact of alternative water management policies at the watershed level. It simulates interactions between human activities (agricultural, domestic and industrial withdrawals, regulations of water uses) and ecological processes (crop growth, plant evapotranspiration and water [...]
A quantitative assessment of the reliability and feasibility of process-based urban stormwater quality models: Towards new evaluation criteria
Published: 2026-02-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Hydrologic models have been increasingly used as a numerical tool to support urban stormwater management. Evaluation of modeling approaches helps identify the strength and weakness of a model to meet end-user requirements. However, traditional model evaluations only focus on the technical performance of a model, whereas very few studies have been conducted to quantitatively evaluate practical [...]
Stadiums as climate-exposed socio-technical infrastructures: a scoping review of fragmented risks and emerging challenges
Published: 2026-01-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies
Stadiums are among the most climate-sensitive infrastructures in global sport, yet the evidence available to characterise their climate-related risks remains fragmented. Although billions of spectators attend sporting events each year and climate change is recognised as a multiplier of existing hazards, research on stadium environments continues to treat risks separately. Heat is examined through [...]
Spontaneous liquefaction in saturated granular deposits: State controlled boundary and surface reconfiguration
Published: 2026-01-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Science and Materials, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Mining Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis
In the case of water-saturated, granular deposits that are at risk of liquefaction, engineers need reliable information about the spatial extent of soil deformation in the event of liquefaction. It is not so important for them to know the exact location of the first failure. However, existing anal-yses primarily deal with the triggering of liquefaction and offer only limited information on how [...]
A pilot study exploring the effect of vehicular waste heat on personal heat exposure
Published: 2026-01-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Understanding the causes of heat in various microclimates in cities is vital to improving human thermal comfort and health in outdoor spaces. This pilot study uses an experimental design to evaluate microclimate heat risk – including ambient air temperature (TA) and wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) – and approximate personal heat exposure of people 1.5-3.0 meters (5-10 feet) away from idling [...]
Liquefaction as an energetic instability of saturated granular systems – Density control and static enthalpy equilibrium
Published: 2025-12-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Materials Science and Engineering, Mining Engineering, Other Materials Science and Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Liquefaction of saturated granular materials is commonly interpreted within stress-based frameworks that rely on the existence of an intact grain skeleton. At the onset of liquefaction, however, the contact network collapses and effective stress ceases to be a meaningful state variable. This work reformulates liquefaction as an enthalpy-driven instability of the coupled grain–water system and [...]
Spatial Patterns of Glacier Meltwater and Mountain Wetland Connectivity in the Peruvian Andes
Published: 2025-12-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Statistical Models
High-altitude wetlands are critical ecosystems that store water, regulate downstream flows, and sustain biodiversity. Their persistence is tightly linked to continuous water inputs from precipitation, groundwater, snow and glacier melt, making them highly vulnerable to climate-driven shifts in mountain hydrology. Rapid glacier retreat, altered precipitation regimes, and rising temperatures are [...]
Comprehensive Assessment of Flood Risk and Community Impact of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in Iowa
Published: 2025-12-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Life Sciences
Flooding presents a significant risk to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), especially in regions increasingly affected by extreme weather events. This study uses advanced geospatial analysis techniques to assess the environmental and economic vulnerabilities of 12,703 CAFOs across Iowa, United States. We focused on the exposure of CAFOS to 100-year and 500-year floodplains, [...]
Adapting Caspian Sea ports to climate-induced water level declines: The case of Aktau
Published: 2025-12-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of water. It is critical for regional trade through the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), which links South-East Asia and China to Europe. Aktau Port in Kazakhstan is strategically important, located on key international transport routes like the TITR. Over the past 30 years, the Caspian Sea’s water levels have dropped from [...]
Climate Network Analysis of Precipitation Regimes from WorldClim Data in Saudi Arabia
Published: 2025-12-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Risk Analysis
Saudi Arabia is shaped by a hydroclimatic gradient, from the hyper-arid Rub’ al-Khali desert to the semi-arid mountains in the southwest. This gradient affects runoff generation, groundwater recharge, and drought risk, yet most studies still summarize rainfall using basic statistics from station data or gridded products. This research applies climate network analysis to identify coherent rainfall [...]