Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Engineering
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 [...]
Catastrophic “Hyperclustering” and Recurrent Losses: Diagnosing U.S. Flood Insurance Insolvency Triggers
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Risk Analysis, Systems Engineering
Although a cornerstone of U.S. flood risk preparedness since 1968, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), is burdened by insolvency. Despite pricing and risk assessment reforms, systemic failures persist, resulting in accumulation of billions in federal debt. This study presents an interdisciplinary framework integrating qualitative synthesis, unsupervised machine learning, and game theory [...]
Multivariate Regression Analysis for Identifying Key Drivers of Harmful Algal Bloom in Lake Erie
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Multivariate Analysis
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), predominantly driven by cyanobacteria, pose significant risks to water quality, public health, and aquatic ecosystems. Lake Erie, particularly its western basin, has been severely impacted by HABs, largely due to nutrient pollution and climatic changes. This study aims to identify key physical, chemical, and biological drivers influencing HABs using a multivariate [...]
Impact of GHG mitigation measures in sanitation service chains: focusing on septic tanks and sewers
Published: 2025-03-26
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Sustainability
Sanitation service chains (SSC) in many cities in low- and middle-income countries are complex and comprise poorly managed non-sewered and sewered sanitation technologies that emit greenhouse gases (GHG). In this study, we aimed to estimate the impact of GHG mitigation measures along SSCs where both non-sewered and sewered sanitation were widely used, and to account for the interdependencies of [...]
Global estimates of groundwater withdrawal trends and uncertainties
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Water Resource Management
Groundwater, Earth’s largest source of liquid freshwater, is essential for sustaining ecosystems and meeting societal demands. However, accurately quantifying global groundwater withdrawals remains a significant challenge due to inherent uncertainties in input data, sectoral allocation assumptions, and model parameterization. In this study, we analyze global groundwater withdrawals from 2001 to [...]
City-Scale Digital Twin Framework for Flood Impact Analysis: Integrating Urban Infrastructure and Real-time Data Analytics
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Risk Analysis, Transportation Engineering
Urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to flooding due to climate change and rapid urbanization. Traditional mapping and decision-support tools lack the capability to integrate real-time data or analyze cascading disruptions across interconnected urban systems. Digital twins offer a promising solution by enabling real-time monitoring, simulation, and optimization of urban environments. This [...]
Towards HydroLLM: A Benchmark Dataset for Hydrology-Specific Knowledge Assessment for Large Language Models
Published: 2025-03-15
Subjects: Environmental Engineering
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled their integration into a wide range of scientific disciplines. This paper introduces a comprehensive benchmark dataset specifically designed for testing recent large language models in hydrology domain. Leveraging a collection of research articles and hydrology textbook and, we generated a wide array of hydrology-specific questions [...]
Beyond Single Hazard Framework: Multi-Hazard Worst Case Scenarios from Ensemble Tropical Cyclone Forecasts
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydrology, Meteorology, Oceanography, Risk Analysis
Ensemble forecasting is a powerful tool for supporting informed decision-making in managing multi-hazard risks associated with tropical cyclones (TCs). Although TC ensemble forecasts are widely used in operational numerical weather prediction systems, their potential for disaster prediction and management has not been fully exploited. Here we propose a novel, efficient, and practical method to [...]
Evaluating coastal multifunctionality: sand nourishment strategies at decadal timescales
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment
Globally, there is a growing societal need for multifunctional coastal climate adaptation of sandy shores in the coming decades. Sand nourishment strategies are increasingly regarded as promising nature-based approaches, as they may increase flood safety and mitigate erosion while enhancing recreational and ecological functioning. However, their multifunctional potential has not yet been assessed [...]
A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis of Large Language Models in Hydrology and Environmental Sciences
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
The application of large language models (LLMs) in hydrology and environmental sciences is expanding rapidly, but a comprehensive understanding of their potential, best practices and application areas are studied extensively. This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of recent scientific literature to evaluate publication trends, citation impact, and the key contributors in LLM-related research [...]