Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Small artificial impoundments have big implications for hydrology and freshwater biodiversity
Published: 2021-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Headwater streams are critical for freshwater ecosystems. Global and continental studies consistently show major dams as dominant sources of hydrological stress threatening biodiversity in the world’s major rivers, but cumulative impacts from small artificial impoundments concentrated in headwater streams have rarely been acknowledged. Using the Murray Darling River basin (Australia) and the [...]
The challenge of setting ‘climate ready’ ecological targets for environmental flow planning
Published: 2021-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences
Implementing environmental flows has emerged as a major restoration tool for addressing the impacts of hydrologic alteration in large river systems. The ‘natural flow paradigm’ has been a central guiding principle for determining important ecohydrological relationships. Yet, climate change and associated changes in rainfall run off relationships, seasonality of flows, disruptions to food webs and [...]
What’s obstructing climate change adaptation in environmental water management?
Published: 2021-12-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences
Climate change is irreversibly changing the water cycle, yet existing environmental flow assessment methods often fail to recognise the non stationarity of hydro climatic systems. Failure to do so will lead to the inability of environmental water management to achieve its restoration targets. Australia has undergone major reform over the past twelve years to recover water from consumptive use for [...]
Environmental Flows Assessments in the face of uncertainty: supporting the adaptive management of environmental flows
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Life Sciences
Adaptive management has become the preferred approach for managing environmental flows globally, and successful implementation recognizes multiple dimensions of variability and complexity in socio-ecological systems. This paper outlines an environmental flow assessment methodology that explicitly addresses the uncertainty and change inherent in adaptively managing multiple values for management [...]
Evaluating essential features of proppant transport at engineering scales combining field measurements with machine learning algorithms
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Hydraulic Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
The characterization of the proppant transport at a field-engineering scale is still challenging due to the lack of direct subsurface measurements. Features that control the proppant transport may link the experimental and numerical observations to the practical operations at a field scale. To improve the numerical and laboratory simulations, we propose a machine-learning-based workflow to [...]
Integrated framework for rapid climate stress testing on a monthly timestep
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
“Bottom-up” methods are increasingly used to assess the vulnerability of water systems to climate change. Central to these methods is the climate “stress test”, where the system is subjected to various climatic changes to test for unacceptable outcomes. We present a framework for climate stress testing on a monthly timestep, suitable for systems whose dominant dynamic is seasonal or longer (eg. [...]
Spatio-temporal clustering of seismicity enabled by off-fault plasticity
Published: 2021-12-06
Subjects: Applied Mechanics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dynamics and Dynamical Systems, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, Engineering Science and Materials, Geophysics and Seismology, Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Other Mechanical Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tribology
While significant progress has been made in understanding earthquake source processes in linear elastic domains, the effect of more realistic rheologies including plasticity is poorly understood. Here, we simulate sequence of earthquake and aseismic slip of a 2D antiplane rate-and-state fault embedded in a full-space elastic-plastic bulk. We show that off-fault plasticity may lead to partial [...]
Optimizing nature-based solutions by combining social equity, hydro-environmental performance, and economic costs through a novel Gini coefficient
Published: 2021-11-15
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Engineering
A robust multi-functional framework for widespread planning of nature-based solutions (NBS) must incorporate components of social equity and hydro-environmental performance in a cost-effective manner. NBS systems address stormwater mitigation by increasing on-site infiltration and evaporation through enhanced greenspace while also improving various components of societal well-being, such as [...]
Flood Risk Assessment and Quantification at the Community and Property Level in the State of Iowa
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Risk Analysis
Flood risk assessment contributes to identifying at-risk communities and supports mitigation decisions to maximize benefits from the investments. Large-scale risk assessments generate invaluable inputs for prioritizing regions for the distribution of limited resources. High-resolution flood maps and accurate parcel information are critical for flood risk analysis to generate reliable outcomes for [...]
Flood Mitigation Data Analytics and Decision Support Framework: Iowa Middle Cedar Watershed Case Study
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Risk Analysis
Flooding is one of the most frequent natural disasters, causing billions of dollars in damage and threatening vulnerable communities worldwide. Although the impact of flooding can never be diminished, minimizing future losses is possible by taking structural or non-structural mitigation actions. Mitigation applications are often costly practices. However, they can be more feasible for long-term [...]
Linking technical geothermal potential from borehole heat exchangers and heating demand scenarios on a regional scale
Published: 2021-10-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Extracting shallow geothermal energy using borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) can help decarbonising the residential heating sector. To assist urban planers and policy makers in developing carbon-neutral heating plans the regional technical shallow geothermal potential must be analysed. Here, we propose a methodology to estimate the technical geothermal potential of BHE fields on a regional scale [...]
Systems-thinking for environmental policy coherence: Stakeholder knowledge, fuzzy logic, and causal reasoning
Published: 2021-10-13
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies
Environmental policies are often chosen according to physical characteristics that disregard the complex interactions between decision-makers, society, and nature. Environmental policy resistance has been identified as stemming from such complexities, yet we lack an understanding of how social and physical factors interrelate to inform policy design. The identification of synergies and trade-offs [...]
Combining shallow-water and analytical wake models for tidal array micro-siting
Published: 2021-07-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Oceanography
For tidal-stream energy to become a competitive renewable energy source, clustering multiple turbines into arrays is paramount. As a result, array optimisation is critical for achieving maximum power performance and reducing cost of energy. However, ascertaining an optimal array layout is a highly complex problem, subject to specific site hydrodynamics and multiple inter-disciplinary [...]
Probabilistic near-field tsunami source and tsunami run-up distribution inferred from tsunami run-up records in northern Chile
Published: 2021-07-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Other Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Understanding a tsunami source and its impact is vital to assess a tsunami hazard. Thanks to the efforts of the tsunami survey teams, high-quality tsunami run-up data exists for contemporary events. Still, it has not been widely used to infer a tsunami source and its impact mainly due to the computational burden of the tsunami forward model. In this study, we propose a TRRF-INV (Tsunami Run-up [...]
Integrating Scientific Knowledge into Machine Learning using Interactive Decision Trees
Published: 2021-07-24
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Decision Trees (DT) is a machine learning method that has been widely used in the geosciences to automatically extract patterns from complex and high dimensional data. However, like any data-based method, the application of DT is hindered by data limitations and potentially physically unrealistic results. We develop interactive DT (iDT) that put the human in the loop and integrate the power of [...]