Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Risk Analysis

Assessing erosion and flood risk in the coastal zone through the application of the multilevel Monte Carlo method

Mariana C A Clare, Matthew Piggott, Colin J Cotter

Published: 2021-01-07
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Computation, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability

The risk from erosion and flooding in the coastal zone has the potential to increase in a changing climate. The development and use of coupled hydro-morphodynamic models is therefore becoming an ever higher priority. However, their use as decision support tools suffers from the high degree of uncertainty associated with them, due to incomplete knowledge as well as natural variability in the [...]

Mapping Landslides With a Generalized Convolutional Neural Network

Nikhil Prakash, Andrea Manconi, Simon Loew

Published: 2020-12-13
Subjects: Geomorphology, Other Earth Sciences, Risk Analysis

Landslides are a common secondary hazard triggered by major earthquakes or extreme rainfall events in steep terrains. Rapid mapping of event landslides is crucial to identify the areas affected by damages as well as for effective disaster response. Traditionally, such maps are generated with visual interpretation of remote sensing imagery (manned/unmanned airborne systems or spaceborne sensors) [...]

Socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation of long-term spent nuclear fuel management strategies: Supplementary method

François Diaz-Maurin, Jerold Yu, Rodney C. Ewing

Published: 2020-11-06
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis, Sustainability

The paper presents supplementary information about the framework and method for the socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation (STMCE) of spent fuel management strategies (Sci Total Environ, In press; Available on EarthArXiv at DOI:10.31223/X5459S). The STMCE approach consists of (i) a multi-criteria evaluation that provides an ordinal ranking of alternatives based on a list of criterion [...]

A machine learning approach for prioritizing groundwater testing for per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)

Sarabeth George, Atray Dixit

Published: 2020-10-19
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Geochemistry, Hydrology, Risk Analysis, Water Resource Management

Regulatory agencies are beginning to recognize and regulate per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as concerning environmental contaminants. In groundwater management, testing and mitigation strategies are desirable, but can be time and cost-intensive processes. As a result, only a fraction of all groundwater wells has been tested for PFAS levels, resulting in potentially extended drinking [...]

Transportation Network Vulnerability and Accessibility for Critical Amenities during Flooding: A Case Study for Iowa

Yazeed Alabbad, Jerry Mount, Ann Melissa Campbell, et al.

Published: 2020-08-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Risk Analysis, Transportation Engineering

Natural disasters, such as flooding, can cause severe social, environmental, and economic damage to a community. Transportation infrastructure plays an essential role in flood response and recovery efforts. However, flooding may disturb road functionality and generate direct and indirect adverse impacts, including the loss of access to essential services. This paper presents a comprehensive [...]

Large model parameter and structural uncertainties in global projections of urban heat waves

Zhonghua Zheng, Lei Zhao, Keith W. Oleson

Published: 2020-06-10
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Urban heat waves (UHWs) are strongly associated with socioeconomic impacts. Reliable projections of these extremes are pressingly needed for local actions in the context of extreme event preparedness and mitigation. Such information, however, is not available because current multi-model projections largely lack a representation of urban areas. Here, we use a newly-developed urban climate emulator [...]

Information-theoretic Portfolio Decision Model for Optimal Flood Management

Matteo Convertino, Antonio Annis, Fernando Nardi

Published: 2019-06-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Probability, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Sustainability, Systems Engineering, Water Resource Management

The increasing impact of flooding urges more effective flood management strategies to guarantee sustainable ecosystem development. Recent catastrophes underline the importance of avoiding local flood management, but characterizing large scale basin wide approaches for systemic flood risk management. Here we introduce an information-theoretic Portfolio Decision Model (iPDM) for the optimization of [...]

Well-being loss: a comprehensive metric for household disaster resilience

Maryia Markhvida, Brian Walsh, Stephane Hallegatte, et al.

Published: 2019-05-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Natural disaster risk assessments typically consider environmental hazard and physical damage, neglecting to quantify how asset losses affect households’ well-being. However, for a given asset loss, a wealthy household might easily recover, while a poor household might suffer from major, long-lasting impacts. Ignoring such differential impacts can lead to inequitable interventions and exacerbate [...]

Trends of hydroclimatic intensity in Colombia

Oscar J. Mesa, Viviana Urrea, Andrés Ochoa

Published: 2019-05-08
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Climate, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydrology, Life Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Water Resource Management

Prediction of changes in precipitation in upcoming years and decades caused by global climate change associated with the greenhouse effect, deforestation and other anthropic perturbations is a practical and scientific problem of high complexity and huge consequences. To advance toward this challenge we look at the daily historical record of all available rain gauges in Colombia to estimate an [...]

Bayesian parameter estimation for space and time interacting earthquake rupture model using historical and physics-based simulated earthquake catalogs

Luis Ceferino, Percy Galvez, Jean Paul Ampuero, et al.

Published: 2019-04-25
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis

This paper presents a robust parameter estimation technique for a probabilistic earthquake hazard model that captures time and space interactions between earthquake mainshocks. The approach addresses the existing limitations of parameter estimation techniques by developing a Bayesian formulation and leveraging physics-based simulated synthetic catalogs to expand the limited datasets of historical [...]

What has Global Sensitivity Analysis ever done for us? A systematic review to support scientific advancement and to inform policy-making in earth system modelling

Thorsten Wagener, Francesca Pianosi

Published: 2019-04-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Computer models are essential tools in the earth system sciences. They underpin our search for understanding of earth system functioning and support decision- and policy-making across spatial and temporal scales. To understand the implications of uncertainty and environmental variability on the identification of such earth system models and their predictions, we can rely on increasingly powerful [...]

Matlab/R workflows to assess critical choices in Global Sensitivity Analysis using the SAFE toolbox

Valentina Noacco, Fanny Sarrazin, Francesca Pianosi, et al.

Published: 2019-04-05
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) is a set of statistical techniques to investigate the effects of the uncertainty in the input factors of a mathematical model on the model’s outputs. The value of GSA for the construction, evaluation, and improvement of earth system models is reviewed in a companion paper by Wagener and Pianosi [n.d.]. The present paper focuses on the implementation of GSA and [...]

Vulnerability of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands to present-day rates of relative sea-level rise

Krista L. Jankowski, Torbjorn Tornqvist, Anjali M Fernandes

Published: 2018-09-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Sedimentology, Soil Science, Stratigraphy, Sustainability

Coastal Louisiana has lost about 5,000km2 of wetlands over the past century and concern exists whether remaining wetlands will persist while facing some of the world’s highest rates of relative sea-level rise (RSLR). Here we analyse an unprecedented data set derived from 274 rod surface-elevation table-marker horizon stations, to determine present-day surface-elevation change, vertical accretion [...]

HYRISK: An R package for hybrid uncertainty analysis using probability, imprecise probability and possibility distributions

Jeremy Rohmer, Jean-Charles Manceau, Dominique Guyonnet, et al.

Published: 2018-08-31
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Engineering, Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Dynamics, Other Applied Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis

Uncertainty analysis is an unavoidable risk assessment task (for instance for natural hazards, or for environmental issues). In situations where data are scarce, incomplete or imprecise, the systematic and only use of probabilities can be debatable. Over the last years, several alternative mathematical representation methods have been developed to handle in a more flexible manner the lack of [...]

Communicating Unnatural Disasters

Robin Lacassin, Iain Stewart, Sylvain Lavelle

Published: 2018-01-02
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Off the back of the 2017 hurricanes we extend the notion of human-influenced meteo-hydro hazards to include deeper geophysical events. We question where to place Human responsibility in a changing world, and we outline ways to bridge the gaps between scientist’s technical knowledge and ‘meaning’ as it is understood by people at risk. This short Op-ed has been rejected by Science after two rounds [...]

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