Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Hydraulic Engineering
A satellite-monitoring research agenda for urban stormwater infrastructure: capabilities, gaps, and a community-benchmark proposal
Published: 2026-06-09
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology
Urban stormwater best management practices (BMPs) are a core component of urban-resilience portfolios worldwide. Per-asset performance monitoring, however, is both limited and difficult to enumerate at the global scale. We argue that publicly available satellite Earth observation has reached the capability point at which the resulting accountability gap can be closed at portfolio scale, and that [...]
Automated GIS-Based Hydrological Modeling Framework for Flood Hydrograph Estimation in Ungauged Mediterranean Catchments: A Case Study of Sicily
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
The estimation of design flood hydrographs in ungauged Mediterranean catchments remains a persistent challenge for hydrological engineering, flood hazard assessment, and territorial risk planning. The absence of discharge observations, coupled with the high temporal concentration of precipitation and the marked geomorphological variability of small basins, renders conventional calibration-based [...]
swmm-breach: Probabilistic dam-breach hydrograph forecasting integrated with EPA SWMM and PCSWMM
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology
The U.S. EPA Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) and its commercial extension PCSWMM are among the most widely deployed open-source urban-hydrology engines worldwide, but neither provides a native facility for simulating embankment-dam, detention-basin, or lagoon failure. Practitioners working on dam-adjacent SWMM models typically generate a breach hydrograph in HEC-RAS, losing their SWMM network [...]
Enhancing the Generalization of Flood Susceptibility Models: A Leakage-Aware Ensemble Framework for Deltaic Landscapes
Published: 2026-05-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Flood susceptibility mapping (FSM) is a cornerstone of disaster risk reduction in low-lying deltaic regions; however, conventional machine learning (ML) applications frequently suffer from spatial data leakage, resulting in inflated performance metrics and unreliable hazard predictions. To address this critical methodological shortcoming, this study develops a robust, leakage-aware ML framework [...]
Quantifying hydropower flexibility during extreme temperature events
Published: 2026-04-20
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Other Mathematics, Power and Energy, Systems Engineering
Extreme weather events can impose substantial stress on the electrical grid. Hydropower offers unique operational flexibility, enhancing grid resilience and reliability. Despite this value of flexibility, systematic assessments of hydropower flexibility -- particularly during extreme events -- remain limited. This study is the first to quantify hydropower operational flexibility using 25 years' [...]
Inverse computational morphology of debris and alluvial fans
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Geographic Information Sciences, Geomorphology, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
In mountain areas, debris flows and fluvial transport often build up conical deposits at the confluence between steep tributaries and trunk rivers. The resulting debris and alluvial fans typically exhibit a well-defined relationship between slope or elevation and the distance from the fan apex. This relationship, however, becomes more difficult to characterize when fans are constrained by the [...]
SIM4Action: An Interactive Platform for Social-Environmental Systems Mapping and Causal Analysis
Published: 2026-03-25
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Hydraulic Engineering, Life Sciences
SIM4Action is an open-source, browser-based platform for participatory analysis of complex socio-environmental systems through interactive causal network graphs. Existing systems mapping tools require practitioners to combine separate software for map construction, network analysis, and causal simulation; none provides an integrated workflow accessible to non-technical stakeholders. SIM4Action [...]
Agentic Modelling Pipeline: Reproducible Rapid Stormwater Modelling Management System with OpenClaw
Published: 2026-03-17
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computational Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Configuring urban hydrological models, such as SWMM, for operational or real-time modelling remains onerous for many models. We propose an Agentic SWMM workflow, which embeds ‘Skills’ and model context protocols to automate model configuration, execution, and extract and plot quantities of interest. To ensure that the entire Agentic SWMM workflow is auditable and reproducible, each run will [...]
Estimation of the water table position in unconfined aquifers with MODFLOW 6
Published: 2026-03-10
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Water Resource Management
The numerical estimation of the position of the water table in unconfined aquifers is important for many practical applications. Its determination through observations or analytical methods is restricted to a few cases. Therefore, it is often estimated through numerical simulations, which may be affected by numerical artifacts and/or poor stability. We use MODFLOW to estimate the position of the [...]
Implementation of Hybrid Genetic-Ant Colony Algorithm (GACA) for Solving Highly Nonlinear Cuttings Transport Models in Directional Foam Drilling
Published: 2026-02-25
Subjects: Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Directional foam drilling is widely applied in the development of complex oil and gas resources due to its advantages of low formation damage and high drilling efficiency, but the highly nonlinear cuttings transport model in this process poses great challenges to parameter optimization. To solve this problem, a hybrid genetic-ant colony algorithm (GACA) is proposed, which integrates the global [...]
Potential groundwater recharge during floods
Published: 2026-02-17
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
Groundwater constitutes 30% of fresh water reserves on Earth. It is important as a source for drinking water and irrigation due to its good quality. For many aquifers in arid regions, long-term groundwater extraction has put in risk its sustainable use. Thus, it is relevant to understand and quantify processes that contribute to sustainable groundwater recharge. Most recharge to aquifers in [...]
Spontaneous liquefaction in saturated granular deposits: State controlled boundary and surface reconfiguration
Published: 2026-01-26
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Engineering Science and Materials, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Mining Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Risk Analysis
In the case of water-saturated, granular deposits that are at risk of liquefaction, engineers need reliable information about the spatial extent of soil deformation in the event of liquefaction. It is not so important for them to know the exact location of the first failure. However, existing anal-yses primarily deal with the triggering of liquefaction and offer only limited information on how [...]
Liquefaction as an energetic instability of saturated granular systems – Density control and static enthalpy equilibrium
Published: 2025-12-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Geophysics and Seismology, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Hydrology, Materials Science and Engineering, Mining Engineering, Other Materials Science and Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Sedimentology
Liquefaction of saturated granular materials is commonly interpreted within stress-based frameworks that rely on the existence of an intact grain skeleton. At the onset of liquefaction, however, the contact network collapses and effective stress ceases to be a meaningful state variable. This work reformulates liquefaction as an enthalpy-driven instability of the coupled grain–water system and [...]
Comprehensive Assessment of Flood Risk and Community Impact of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in Iowa
Published: 2025-12-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Life Sciences
Flooding presents a significant risk to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), especially in regions increasingly affected by extreme weather events. This study uses advanced geospatial analysis techniques to assess the environmental and economic vulnerabilities of 12,703 CAFOs across Iowa, United States. We focused on the exposure of CAFOS to 100-year and 500-year floodplains, [...]
Community-Oriented Data Integration and Communication Framework for Streamflow Forecast Models and Flood Inundation Map Products
Published: 2025-12-24
Subjects: Civil Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Water Resource Management
Access to critical flood risk information is often limited by expert-driven workflows that require specialized software, creating a barrier to stakeholder engagement and effective science communication. This study presents a generalized web-based framework that integrates federal datasets to support real-time, scenario-based flood forecasting and mapping across the continental United States. By [...]