Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Engineering
Multi-Task Learning as a Step Toward Building General-Purpose Hydrological Forecasting Systems
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Multivariate Analysis
Streamflow and soil moisture are two critical variables in the hydrological cycle, linked through infiltration, runoff generation, and groundwater recharge. Traditional forecasting approaches often treat them independently, overlooking interdependencies and limiting predictive skill. This study investigates Multi-Task Learning (MTL) for daily prediction of both variables using the CAMELS dataset [...]
Smart Urban Design with Physics-Informed Neural Networks: Quantifying Temperature Reductions from Green Infrastructure Using Satellite Thermal Data
Published: 2025-10-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Urban Heat Islands (UHIs), characterised by elevated temperatures in densely built environments, pose critical challenges to urban sustainability, public health, and energy resilience. Mitigating UHIs requires precise quantification of the cooling effects of green infrastructure; however, existing models often fail to integrate high-resolution geospatial data with physical laws. This study [...]
A real time reservoir inflow forecast evaluation framework
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Recent advances in data driven hydrologic forecasts have led to a multitude of new and rapidly improving streamflow forecast products and technologies. These often lead hydropower producers to question whether such advances translate into increases in revenue and whether implementing these new forecasts justify the additional associated costs. To address this, we present a general framework that [...]
Mitigation of Ultraviolet Solar Radiation Involving Calcite (MUSIC)
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection
This investigation explores the use of calcite (CaCO3) powder, the most common and radiation- resistant form of calcium carbonate, as an environmentally friendly mechanism for solar radiation management by measuring its ability to deflect ultraviolet radiation from the sun. The experiment took place on a high-altitude balloon (HAB) payload. Three sets of laminated calcite sheets with varying [...]
Worldwide inference of national methane emissions by inversion of satellite observations with UNFCCC prior estimates
Published: 2025-10-02
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Environmental Engineering
Meeting climate policy goals to reduce methane emissions under the Paris Agreement and the Global Methane Pledge requires nations to set targets and quantify reductions. Individual countries report emissions by sector to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) but there are large uncertainties. Here we optimize 2023 national emissions at up to 25 km grid resolution for [...]
Impact of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on Ecosystem Services: A Multi-Module InVEST-LCM Analysis
Published: 2025-09-24
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics influence ecological processes and the provision of essential ecosystem services (ESs). So, understanding how LULC changes influence ESs is critical for sustainable land management and conservation planning, especially in rapidly urbanizing watersheds. Despite studies examining individual ecosystem services, there remains a notable research gap in [...]
Spatiotemporal Urban Flood Expansion and Propagation by Percentage of Node in Flood Assessment (PNFA)
Published: 2025-09-18
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering
Urban pluvial flooding is a complex process shaped by rainfall intensity, drainage system capacity, and urban infrastructure. While previous studies have mapped flood extents, the spatiotemporal evolution of drainage saturation and overflow propagation remain insufficiently explored. This study introduces the Percentage of Node in Flood Assessment (PNFA), integrating the Flood Expansion Rate [...]
Advancing Long-Horizon Hydrological Forecasting: A Mamba-based Approach with Explainable AI for Generalized Streamflow Prediction
Published: 2025-09-02
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
Accurate long-horizon streamflow forecasting is crucial for water resource management, but existing models often face efficiency and interpretability challenges. This study comprehensively evaluates the Mamba architecture, which utilizes State Space Models for efficient sequence processing, for 120-hour hourly generalized streamflow prediction across 125 diverse Iowa watersheds using 72-hour [...]
Cooling Performance: Exploring the Heat Mitigation Effect of Urban Trees with Computer Vision
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Other Computer Sciences
Rising summer temperatures are placing increasing pressure on many cities to adapt public spaces for heightened heat stress. While the cooling benefits of urban trees are well documented, there remains a limited understanding of how these effects vary across tree types, morphologies, and urban contexts. This study addresses this knowledge gap by employing computer vision techniques to analyze [...]
Low-cost autonomous chambers enable high spatial and temporal resolution monitoring of soil CO₂ exchange across landscapes
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Climate, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Meteorology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Soil Science, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Soil CO₂ flux is a critical component of ecosystem carbon cycling, but due to high cost and mechanistic constraints, existing measurement systems are often limited by trade-offs between resolution (temporal and spatial), and spatial coverage. These constraints hinder efforts to monitor soil fluxes across diverse, heterogeneous landscapes and environmental gradients. 2. We developed Fluxbot [...]
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: 2025-08-07
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 [...]