Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Engineering
Technological Adaptation Outpaces Climate Impacts on Aviation: Evidence from Three Decades of Warming
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate impact assessments frequently prioritize projections over empirical validation of operational outcomes. We introduce and apply a generalizable empirical validation framework that (i) separates operational encounters from safety outcomes and (ii) tests climate → operations linkages via physical mechanism validation with explicit detectability bounds. Using 33 years (1991–2023) of U.S. [...]
wave-attenuation-1d: An idealized one-dimensional framework for wave attenuation through coastal vegetation using Numba-accelerated shallow water equations
Published: 2025-08-06
Subjects: Applied Mechanics, Environmental Engineering, Fluid Dynamics, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Oceanography
Coastal vegetation provides crucial wave attenuation for shoreline protection, yet existing models are either computationally prohibitive or lack transparency for educational purposes. This study presents wave-attenuation-1d, an open-source Python package implementing linearized shallow water equations with vegetation-induced drag to simulate wave propagation through coastal vegetation. The [...]
Impact of oxygen release from bentonite on microbial activity, mineralogy, and steel corrosion
Published: 2025-07-19
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Geochemistry
Deep geological repositories for the disposal of radioactive waste rely partly on the integrity of canisters and on the inhibition of microbial growth by the bentonite barrier for the effective isolation of the waste from the environment. Canister integrity can be compromised by the activity of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) and by abiotic corrosion. Unexpected aerobic microbial growth and SRB [...]
Screening Global Solar and Wind Energy Investment Potential Accounting for Drought and Surplus
Published: 2025-07-14
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Risk Analysis, Sustainability
Climate-induced variability of solar and wind energy impacts renewable electricity scaling. Long duration renewable energy droughts, i.e., extended periods of renewable supply deficits, lead to contract penalties or use of thermo-electric sources, while long duration surpluses result in curtailment or in low energy prices and revenue. We present the first global assessment of the implied [...]
Thermal analysis of meso-scale high-temperature Borehole Thermal Energy Storage (BTES) systems with varying operational cycles
Published: 2025-07-12
Subjects: Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Other Mechanical Engineering
High temperature and short-term subsurface heat storage using BTES is a promising option and an emerging technology for increasing the fraction of renewable energy in the heat sector and supplying stored heat at high and directly usable temperatures. Investigation of thermal interactions of multiple BHEs employed for high-temperature cyclic storage operations is required to understand the system [...]
AI-Assisted Voice Enabled Computing Framework for Hydrological Analysis
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Computer and Systems Architecture, Environmental Engineering, Higher Education
This work presents a web-based, voice-enabled, no-code platform for AI-assisted hydrological analysis. The system allows users to interact through natural language—via both text and speech—to retrieve data, utilize hydrological functions, and visualize spatial and analytical outputs. Core components include a conversational AI assistant utilizing Large Language Models, a modular analysis engine [...]
HydroBlox: AI-Assisted Visual Programming Framework for Enhanced Scientific Reproducibility in Hydrology
Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Education, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Science and Mathematics Education
Scientific workflow reproducibility for hydrological and environmental analyses remains a challenge due to the heterogeneity of data sources, analysis protocols, and evolving visualization needs. This study introduces HydroBlox, a client-side browser-based framework that supports the creation, execution, and export of hydrological workflows using a visual programming interface. The platform [...]
IMPACTS OF LAND-USE CHANGES ATTRIBUTED TO DISCHARGE LEVEL OF MAHA OYA RIVER BASIN, SRI LANKA
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
River discharge in tropical regions are driven by both rainfall and land-use changes. This study quantifies how land-cover change and altered rainfall regimes have affected discharge in the Maha Oya River basin, Sri Lanka. Previous studies suggest that the river basin had been subjected to serious erosion due to increased soil digging, clay mining, and high flood vulnerability over the last three [...]
Assessing the Efficacy and Climate Resilience of Traditional Water Harvesting Systems in Jodhpur District, Rajasthan: A Geospatial and Hydrological Modeling Approach
Published: 2025-06-09
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences
Traditional Water Harvesting Systems (TWHS) are critical for water security in arid regions like Jodhpur district, Rajasthan, India, yet their contemporary efficacy and climate resilience remain inadequately quantified. This study comprehensively assesses selected TWHS, primarily nadis and johads, by integrating geospatial analysis for inventory and characterization, hydrological modeling (SCS-CN [...]
Mapping the health harm of Bangladeshi brick kilns
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring
Bangladesh suffers from poor air quality, with brick kilns as major contributors that remain difficult to regulate. We combine remotely-sensed data, machine learning, and air-quality models to locate 9,187 clay brick kilns (2014–2024), estimating their technology, activity status, and health effects. Active kilns peaked in 2019 and have since declined by 4% annually. Kiln emissions cause [...]
ARIA: Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability Assessment
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering
ARIA (Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability Assessment) is a Python package designed to streamline the calculation of environmental impacts based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. It leverages Brightway2 (Mutel, 2017) as its core infrastructure, enabling robust LCA modelling while automating several steps that traditionally require tedious manual effort. ARIA utilises large [...]
Biorestorer: Synthetic Succession for Soil Restoration in Arid and Degraded Regions
Published: 2025-05-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Life Sciences
Soil degradation in arid and semi-arid regions poses a critical threat to global ecological stability and food security. This paper introduces Biorestorer, a systems-based framework for initiating synthetic succession and synthetic pedogenesis in highly degraded or sterile substrates where natural recovery is infeasible. The Biorestorer concept integrates dual-temperature biochar, [...]
Temporal convolutional networks for subsidence prediction in snowy regions
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Sustainability
This paper introduces a model based on a temporal convolutional network (TCN) for predicting future land subsidence caused by groundwater pumping for snow melting. Developed using historical snowfall and cumulative subsidence data from Joetsu City, Japan, the model demonstrates satisfactory performance in predicting observed land subsidence. The results suggest that TCNs are effective for [...]
From natural variability to flow homogenisation: how dams, water diversions, and climate change reduced seasonal flows in Australia’s Murrumbidgee River
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
River regulation and climate change have profoundly altered seasonal flow dynamics globally, with cascading ecological impacts on freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. Magnitude and timing are key components of the flow regime, connecting rivers with floodplains and driving feeding and breeding cues for aquatic organisms. We investigated the separate and combined effects of water resource [...]
Leveraging Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) for Urban Climate Emulation
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences
Urban climate models are critical for understanding and addressing the impacts of urban climate change. Yet, process-based urban climate models face limitations of high-entry barriers and substantial computing resource consumption, prompting the development of data-driven methods. However, the recently developed urban climate emulators, being location-dependent, are less scalable and may overlook [...]