Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Performance of Machine Learning for Ozone Modeling in Southern California during the COVID-19 Shutdown
Published: 2023-11-28
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
We combine machine learning (ML) and geospatial interpolations to create two-dimensional high-resolution ozone concentration fields over the South Coast Air Basin (SoCAB) for the entire year of 2020. Three spatial interpolation methods (bicubic, IDW, and ordinary kriging) were employed. The predicted ozone concentration fields were constructed using 15 building sites predicted by the ML method, [...]
High resolution landslide susceptibility mapping using ensemble machine learning and geospatial big data
Published: 2023-11-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Landslide susceptibility represents the potential of slope failure for given geo-environmental conditions. The existing landslide susceptibility maps suffer from several limitations, such as being based on limited data, heuristic methodologies, low spatial resolution, and small areas of interest. In this study, we overcome all these limitations by developing a probabilistic framework that [...]
Pacific shoreline erosion and accretion patterns controlled by El Niño/Southern Oscillation
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
In the Pacific Basin, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant mode of interannual climate variability, driving substantial changes in oceanographic forcing and impacting Pacific coastlines. Yet, how sandy coasts respond to these basin-scale changes has to date been limited to a few long-term beach monitoring sites, predominantly on developed coasts. Here we use 38 years of Landsat [...]
Continental scale hydrostratigraphy: comparing geologically informed data products to analytical solutions
Published: 2023-09-12
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geology, Hydrology
This study synthesizes two different methods for estimating hydraulic conductivity (K) at large scales. We derive analytical approaches that estimate K and apply them to the contiguous US. We then compare these analytical approaches to three-dimensional, national gridded K data products and three transmissivity (T) data products developed from publicly available sources. We evaluate these data [...]
Social Vulnerability and Climate Risk Assessment for Agricultural Communities in The United States
Published: 2023-08-18
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science
Floods and droughts significantly affect agricultural activities and pose a threat to food security by subsequently reducing agricultural production. The impact of flood events is distributed disproportionately among agricultural communities based on their socio-economic fabric. Understanding climate-related hazards is critical for planning mitigation measures to secure vulnerable communities. [...]
A Web-based Decision Support Framework for Optimizing Road Network Accessibility and Emergency Facility Allocation During Flooding
Published: 2023-08-03
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Risk Analysis
Transportation systems can be significantly affected by flooding, leading to physical damage and subsequent adverse impacts such as increased travel distance to essential services. Even though flooding is a frequently recurring phenomenon that can affect thousands of people per event, there are limited accessible online tools available for analyzing and visualizing flood risk for supporting [...]
Satellite-derived shorelines for monitoring of sandy beaches: a benchmark study
Published: 2023-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geomorphology, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Satellite remote sensing is becoming a widely used monitoring technique in coastal sciences. Yet, no benchmarking studies exist that compare the performance of popular satellite-derived shoreline (SDS) mapping algorithms against standardized sets of inputs and validation data. Here we present a new benchmarking framework to evaluate the accuracy of shoreline change observations extracted from [...]
Assessing Precipitation Trends that may inform Aging Dam Overtopping across the USA
Published: 2023-07-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Hydrology, Risk Analysis
In many cases, persistent or recurrent synoptic circulation patterns lead to multiple wet days that precede an extreme rainfall event. The joint occurrence of high antecedent rainfall and extreme rainfall defines a compound event that may pose a high risk for overtopping of aging dams. Our novel analysis assesses whether there are significant trends across the conterminous United States (CONUS) [...]
Can crop production intensification through irrigation be sustainable? An ex-ante impact study of the coastal zone of Bangladesh
Published: 2023-07-05
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
In Bangladesh’s south-central coastal zone, there is considerable potential to intensify crop production by growing dry winter season ‘Boro’ rice, maize, wheat, pulses and oilseeds using irrigation from southward flowing and predominantly freshwater rivers. However, the impacts of surface water withdrawal for irrigation and its safe operating space remain unclear. We used field measurements and [...]
Development and validation of an Alaskan coupled storm surge, tide, wind wave, and sea ice forecasting system
Published: 2023-06-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Western Alaska regularly experiences storm surge events induced by extra-tropical storms, most active during fall, winter, and spring. Among others, the presence of sea ice in Western Alaska seawater poses a challenge in modeling storm surge in this area. Existing storm surge models rarely consider sea ice effects together with wind-induced wave effects. In this paper, we present an ALaska [...]
Flood sequence mapping with multimodal remote sensing under the influence of dense vegetation
Published: 2023-06-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Remote sensing (RS) imagery is becoming increasingly popular in surface water extent extraction thanks to the increasing availability of RS data and advancements in image processing algorithms, software, and hardware. Many studies proved that RS imagery can work independently or along with other approaches to identify flood extent. However, due to the insufficiency in the number of images from [...]
Non-structural Flood Mitigation Optimization at Community Scale: Middle Cedar Case Study
Published: 2023-06-07
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Risk Analysis
Flooding is the leading natural hazard in Iowa and has resulted in billions of dollars of damage to properties and critical infrastructure over the past couple of decades. Land alterations, urbanization, and changing precipitation regimes increase the magnitude and frequency of flood events. Considering the increasing risk, flood mitigation efforts are significant to reduce future losses. In this [...]
Ensemble modeling of the two-dimensional stochastic confined groundwater flow through the evolution of the hydraulic head's probability density function
Published: 2023-06-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Groundwater storage in aquifers has become a vital water source due to water scarcity in recent years. However, aquifer systems are full of uncertainties, which inevitably propagate throughout the modeling computations, mainly reducing the reliability of the model output. This study develops a novel two-dimensional stochastic confined groundwater flow model. The proposed model is developed by [...]
Listening to Manchester: Using citizen science Raspberry Shake seismometers to quantify road traffic
Published: 2023-05-31
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Geography
Road traffic is a major contributor to greenhouse gases in our cities. This study has been designed to test whether low-cost citizen science seismometers (Raspberry Shakes) can be used to quantify temporal and spatial variations in road traffic. I used a network of seismometers installed around Greater Manchester to record signals in the frequency range 1-50 Hz. Data were processed using the open [...]
Chasing the water table: The impact of groundwater depletion on rural drinking water supply in peninsular India
Published: 2023-05-25
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Groundwater overexploitation has been cited as one of the biggest threats to rural drinking water in India, but there is very little quantitative evidence. In this paper, we aim to understand (1) the extent of actual groundwater depletion and its impact on rural drinking water supply systems, (2) the primary driver of groundwater depletion and (3) the additional financial burden in finding new [...]