Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Risk Analysis
A pipeline for representing buildings as fuels in wildland urban fire spread and risk modeling
Published: 2026-07-09
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Databases and Information Systems, Engineering, Geographic Information Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Mechanical Engineering, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical and Environmental Geography, Risk Analysis, Software Engineering, Spatial Science
Wildfires pose an increasing risk to structures and communities located adjacent to or among vegetative landscapes. Yet most open landscape-scale fire modeling workflows still lack a reproducible way to represent buildings as combustible fuels rather than only as exposed assets or nonburnable developed land. This paper presents FireDX, a geospatial data engine that generates standardized, [...]
Beyond a Single Risk Score: Posterior Rank Uncertainty in Wildfire Exposure of Transmission Corridors
Published: 2026-07-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis
Transmission-line wildfire risk management frequently demands segment-level priority triage, whereas records regarding equipment status, power outages and routine inspections remain non-public. This study establishes a reproducible framework relying solely on publicly accessible datasets to conduct retrospective external wildfire exposure ranking for transmission line segments across California. [...]
Probabilistic Regional Conditioning of Natural Hazard Loss Models
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Risk Analysis
Natural hazard risk models underpin decisions from insurance pricing to infrastructure investment, yet their accuracy depends on vulnerability functions rarely calibrated to local conditions. The most accurate vulnerability functions capture regional building characteristics through multi-variable models or large engineering-based loss-function databases, but need detailed asset-level data that [...]
A 10,000-Year Global Stochastic Tropical Cyclone Catalog with Wind-Dependent Track Transitions (WHITS)
Published: 2026-05-21
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Risk Analysis
Reliable assessment of tropical cyclone risk is limited by the short and spatially uneven historical record, especially for rare, high-intensity landfalls that dominate insured loss. We present WHITS, the Wind-focused Hurricane Interactive Track Simulator, a non-parametric semi-Markov model that generates a 10,000-year global synthetic catalog of tropical cyclone tracks. WHITS builds new storms [...]
Simulation-Based Sensitivity Analysis of Check-Dam Height Effects on Downstream Debris-Flow Depth for Structural Countermeasure Scenarios
Published: 2026-05-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Other Engineering, Risk Analysis
Check dams can influence debris-flow propagation, but their effects may depend on location, height, and local topographic conditions. This study evaluates the sensitivity of downstream debris-flow depth to check-dam height scenarios using numerical simulations of a mountainous catchment in Atami, Japan. Six hypothetical check-dam locations were placed along the torrent, and 4,877 valid cases were [...]
The Role of Humidity in Past and Future Fire Weather Trends in the Contiguous United States
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Other Earth Sciences, Risk Analysis
There has been evidence of increasing fire activity in the United States since approximately the 1980s, now estimated to cause tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of damage per year. Weather is one of the key drivers of fire activity, with hot, dry, and windy weather commonly associated with high-risk conditions. We are still, however, developing an understanding of how these weather [...]
Towards Prospective Disaster Risk Management: Mapping Multi-hazard Urban Risk Dynamics Driven by Evolving Exposure and Vulnerability via Earth Observation
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Categorical Data Analysis, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Other Computer Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Risk Analysis, Spatial Science, Structural Engineering
As local governments increasingly adopt geospatial Climate and Disaster Risk Assessment (CDRA) to inform prospective public policy, the reliability of existing static risk intelligence is challenged by the continuous evolution of building exposure, population distribution, and physical vulnerability. Recent multi-temporal datasets of the built environment, derived from Earth Observation, have [...]
Stress testing insurance market stability under climate risk
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis
Climate change, urban development, and evolving insurance markets threaten the stability of disaster-risk financing. Homeowners insurance is embedded in a layered network of reinsurers, capital markets, and public backstops that can be overwhelmed by extreme events. We develop a probabilistic risk propagation model linking tropical cyclone wind and flood losses to Florida’s residential insurance [...]
From Impact Chains to Decision-Support: Designing CRISP, a Climate Risk Planning Tool for Agri-Food Systems
Published: 2026-04-01
Subjects: Risk Analysis
Systematically integrating climate risk considerations into development planning remains a persistent challenge, particularly where a lot of information needs to be gathered and practical, accessible tools and databases are lacking. Existing climate risk assessment approaches are often complex, resource-intensive, or not designed for specific sectoral contexts. To address this gap, the Climate [...]
Spatial-Temporal Assessment of Natural Disaster Losses Using Comb- ined AHP-Entropy Weight Method: A Case Study of Jiangxi Province
Published: 2026-03-29
Subjects: Risk Analysis
The Disaster Situation Index (DSI) serves as a crucial method for natural disaster loss assessment. However, the weight determination in existing assessment practices is characterized by strong subjectivity and methodological singularity, while the classification of DSI also suffers from artificial subjective arbitrariness. To resolve these two issues, this study proposes a hybrid approach [...]
Robust Uneven Shift of Extreme Storm Surges Observed in Data Sparse Northeast Indian Ocean Cities
Published: 2026-03-19
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Reanalysis-driven storm surge datasets enable extreme analysis, but previous studies translate these time series into extremes using a single statistical model, leaving model-selection uncertainty unquantified. In this study, we analyze ERA5-forced surge residual dataset (1950–2024) from Copernicus Climate Change Service for data-sparse 11 Northeast Indian Ocean (NIO) cities using an ensemble of [...]
Frictional weakening in the highly mobile 2025 Blatten (Switzerland) rock–ice avalanche
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Dynamics and Dynamical Systems, Geomorphology, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Multivariate Analysis, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, Planetary Geomorphology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Risk Analysis
Cascading slope failures in alpine environments are intensifying as glaciers retreat and slope stability adjusts to a warming climate. Yet, the mechanisms governing such large, rapidly evolving events remain poorly understood. The 28 May 2025 rock–ice avalanche from Birch Glacier, Switzerland ($\approx9.3\times10^{6}~\mathrm{m^3}$), which devastated part of the village of Blatten, provides a [...]
HIGH-RESOLUTION DIGITAL TERRAIN MODEL FOR THE ITALIAN TERRITORY
Published: 2026-03-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Mining Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Social and Behavioral Sciences
High-resolution digital terrain models are essential for environmental planning and territorial analyses, and provide foundations for geomorphological and hydrological applications, including flood and landslide modelling and geo-hydrological hazard and risk assessments. In Italy, airborne LiDAR surveys have improved the representation of terrain morphology in the last decade, but their coverage [...]
Governing Generative AI in Disaster Risk Management
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Risk Analysis
The increasing frequency and severity of climate-related disasters, as well as scarcity of resources to counter them, highlight the urgent need for advanced tools in assessing and managing natural hazards. Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence offer new avenues to enhance disaster risk management. Among these advancements, large language models (LLMs) hold potential for [...]
Diurnal asymmetry in heat stress intensification across Bangladesh, 1985–2024: Accelerated nighttime warming and emerging urban risk
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Risk Analysis
Bangladesh’s rapidly growing cities are becoming hotter, but how heat stress is changing over the day–night cycle has remained unclear. Using 40 years (1985–2024) of hourly Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) data from ERA5-HEAT, we examined long-term changes in physiologically relevant heat stress across Bangladesh and its major cities. Results show a clear day–night imbalance in warming: [...]