Hasil untuk "Disasters and engineering"

Abid Farooq Rather, Rayees Ahmed, Taha Shamim et al.

Abstract The cryosphere of the Himalaya–Karakoram is rapidly retreating under climate change, leading to widespread formation and expansion of glacial lakes and increasing the risk of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). To date, more than 388 GLOF events have been documented in the region, primarily from moraine- and ice-dammed lakes, with the highest frequency reported in the Karakoram, followed by the Central and Eastern Himalaya. Ice avalanches and extreme precipitation are the most common triggers. Growing exposure of settlements and infrastructure amplifies impacts, highlighting the need to integrate physical science with social vulnerability, preparedness, and adaptation strategies.

Eleanor Starkey, Mark Davinson, Sophie Liu et al.

ABSTRACT Nature‐based solutions are increasingly recognised for their potential to address multiple sustainable development goals and transform degraded urban areas into liveable spaces. Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS), increasingly considered a sub‐set of these, are widely used to improve urban flood and climate resilience. Although they can enhance water quality, water quantity, biodiversity and amenity when implemented effectively, they often underperform, underdeliver and are designed with a single goal in mind. These complex demands require new ways of working to integrate diverse perspectives into a single scheme or space, such as placemaking, which shapes spaces with local people to enhance connection, meaning and long‐term care. This paper argues for leveraging nature‐based water management to maximise urban resilience and proposes a community‐led framework to ensure that sustainable, multi‐benefit solutions are designed with and for local citizens. We introduce the UK's Defra‐funded ‘SuDS+’ project, which pilots SuDS through a community lens. Based on visioning, prioritisation, co‐design, implementation and legacy, a framework is being tested in County Durham (UK) to ensure community involvement at every stage. This approach expands beyond traditional flood risk management in several ways. We present empirical examples from the community ‘visioning’ and ‘prioritisation’ stages that initiate this placemaking process, then demonstrate how suggestions can be shortlisted using an innovative filtering tool to transform ideas into coherent ‘SuDS+ concepts’. These steps balance flood risk (SuDS) with community (‘+’) needs ahead of the co‐design and implementation phases. We then share a series of reflections and refinements. Our research demonstrates that community members offer a broader range of ideas and are more likely to engage with, understand, support and care for solutions that they co‐design within their neighbourhood. Significant in‐person engagement is crucial as urban flooding is not a top priority for them; jobs, housing, education, accessible spaces and a sense of pride and ownership are. Leveraging these priorities to design multifunctional solutions for (and by) flood risk management could catalyse sustainable urban development and reveal the true potential of nature‐based flood management. Such an approach could transform the water sector by fostering cross‐sector collaborations to generate cost‐effective, high‐quality spatial and socially meaningful solutions. Moving forward, participatory governance, effective partnerships, diverse skills, robust monitoring frameworks and realistic policy updates are required to streamline SuDS delivery, avoid duplication and demonstrate multi‐benefit impacts.

Jialin XU, Weibing ZHU, Dayang XUAN et al.

Ground control is a science of mitigating or eliminating mining damage by controlling the breaking motion of mining rock strata, with the aim of ensuring safe, efficient and green mining. There are two limitations in the traditional thoughts and methods of ground control research: only studying the local rock movement instead of the overall movement of the overlying rocks in the whole stratum, and homogenizing the overlying rocks instead of grasping the main contradictions. In view of these problems, in the process of key stratum theory research and engineering application, the ‘full-stratigraphy’ thought of ground control has been formed, whose basic connotation is as follows: firstly, ‘grasping the main contradiction’, to find the key stratum (i.e. the main contradiction) that plays a major role in controlling the overburden movement without homogenizing the overlying rocks. Secondly, it is ‘overall view’, which takes the overburden as a global object, considers all the factors that may have a significant impact on the breakage and instability of the key stratum from a global view, and analyses the manifestation of mining pressure, water and gas transport, and surface subsidence from the point of view of the whole activity of the overburden movement. According to the basic connotation of the thought of full-stratigraphy, when carrying out ground control research, it is necessary to collect full-stratigraphy data and key stratum discrimination studies within different mining scales (mine, mining area, workings and blocks), the complete coring columnar that contains all the information of the rock strata from the vicinity under the mined coal seam all the way to the surface, and then form an overall portrait of the rock stratum endowment characteristics in the research area through the comparison of the columnar of multiple drill holes. The comparison of multiple drill hole columns will form an overall picture of the characteristics of the rock strata in the study area, rather than using only partial columns or comprehensive columns, or homogenizing the whole column. It is necessary to consider the possible effects of changes in the location of the columns and key stratum in different regions on the movement of the rock layer. Secondly, it is also necessary to fully consider the original rock stress, geological structure, topography, water load, mining deployment and so on, which may lead to abnormal loads on the key stratum and its breakage. On this basis, the relation between key stratum movement and various mining engineering phenomena or disasters is established, based on which the mechanism of the problem is analyzed and the targeted rock control methods are put forward. The full-stratigraphy thought has promoted the theoretical development and practical innovation of ground control, solved a series of engineering problems of disaster prevention and control such as supports crushing, water-inrush, subsidence, etc., and achieved remarkable results. The main innovations in the theory of rock stratum control achieved by using the full-stratigraphy thought include revealing the accumulative effect of overburden strata expansion induced by stress relief, establishing a structural model of ‘key stratum - loose stratum arch’ of the mining overburden, proposing a new method to predict the height of fractured water-conducting zone by location of key stratum, and initially establishing a method for estimating the surface subsidence based on the structure of key stratum, and so on. It lays a foundation for engineering application. Typical examples of the full-stratigraphy thought in engineering application include: finding out the root cause of pressurized racking in the uphill section of shallow buried coal seam gully and mining under unconsolidated confined aquifer, completely solving the engineering problems of pressurized racking prevention and control; quantifying the influence of the location of the key stratum on the ‘water flowing fracture height’, solving the problems of preventing and controlling the abnormal water breakout of the roof; proposing the ‘three-zone’ distribution of the unloaded gas in coal seam, which has guided the practice of unloaded gas extraction; it has developed isolated overburden grout injection and filling technology, and created a new mode of ground drilling and one-injection high-efficiency filling and green mining, which has solved the problems of surface subsidence control, and has been comprehensively popularized and applied.

Yong Chen, Pengfei Wang, Yongjun Li et al.

Due to the complex coal mining conditions in China, safe production and environmental preservation are significantly impacted by effective mine gas extraction and orderly mine gas discharge. The surfactant cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) and micro- and nano-bubbles were dissolved in water to create a liquid-gas coupling medium, which was then utilized as the mass transfer carrier to reduce drag, increase the coefficient of permeability, and improve the displacement of coal gas. Combined with instantaneous seepage flow and gas permeability measurements, the effects of the liquid-gas coupling medium in reducing drag, increasing permeability, and strengthening displacement of anthracite were quantified. The drag-reduction seepage model under the action of the liquid-gas coupling medium was established. The interface characteristics and mechanism of the liquid-gas coupling medium on coal water seepage displacement were revealed. Based on the characteristics of pore seepage and boundary slip, a drag-reduction seepage model was established by comparing the internal pore structure of coal with that of pores in the circular tube. The interface and mechanism of the liquid-gas coupling medium in the coal water seepage displacement were described using Darcian seepage as a basis. The synergistic effect of the liquid-gas coupling medium provides a new technical direction for seepage displacement and anti-outburst extraction from coal seams.

Pingsong ZHANG, Jinquan CHENG, Shiang XU et al.

Regional treatment through surface high-pressure grouting is one of the primary prevention and control measures for safe coal mining beneath thick and loose confined aquifers. However, the high-pressure grouting process can induce movement and deformation of the overlying strata, leading to local surface uplift and structural deflection in the mining area. This phenomenon is a critical concern in the safety management of regional grouting transformations. Based on the engineering context of grouting transformations in a water-rich sandstone beneath the roof covering at working surface 120501 of a mining area in Anhui Province, this study employs numerical simulations utilizing the COMSOL Multiphysics finite element method. It investigates the process and temporal evolution characteristics of the overlying strata before and after high-pressure grouting. Furthermore, a distributed fiber optic full-section monitoring system is constructed to assess the deformation characteristics of the overlying strata at various depths and their influence on surface disturbances. The findings indicate that the regional high-pressure grouting process can be delineated into three distinct stages: “filling” “diffusion” and “disturbance”. The filling stage exhibits minimal disturbance to the overlying strata, whereas the diffusion stage generates horizontal disturbances. During the disturbance stage, significant vertical displacements are observed in the overlying strata. The influence of grouting on formation disturbance during the reconstruction process follows an increasing trend represented by a Logistic curve. The primary impact of disturbance occurs in the lower sections of the thick loose layer, with vertical arching observed predominantly in the relative water barrier section and compression occurring in the aquifer section. Monitoring results reveal that the deformation characteristics throughout the grouting process are nonlinear, with the sandy clay strata and silty sand strata identified as the primary contributors to deformation. The outcomes of full-section monitoring and numerical simulations align well. The results can offer insights and practical references for ensuring the safe operation of coal mines and effectively preventing and controlling secondary disasters triggered by regional grouting in the eastern thick loose layer covered mining area.

Anatoly A. Krasnovsky

Chaos engineering reveals resilience risks but is expensive and operationally risky to run broadly and often. Model-based analyses can estimate dependability, yet in practice they are tricky to build and keep current because models are typically handcrafted. We claim that a simple connectivity-only topological model - just the service-dependency graph plus replica counts - can provide fast, low-risk availability estimates under fail-stop faults. To make this claim practical without hand-built models, we introduce model discovery: an automated step that can run in CI/CD or as an observability-platform capability, synthesizing an explicit, analyzable model from artifacts teams already have (e.g., distributed traces, service-mesh telemetry, configs/manifests) - providing an accessible gateway for teams to begin resilience testing. As a proof by instance on the DeathStarBench Social Network, we extract the dependency graph from Jaeger and estimate availability across two deployment modes and five failure rates. The discovered model closely tracks live fault-injection results; with replication, median error at mid-range failure rates is near zero, while no-replication shows signed biases consistent with excluded mechanisms. These results create two opportunities: first, to triage and reduce the scope of expensive chaos experiments in advance, and second, to generate real-time signals on the system's resilience posture as its topology evolves, preserving live validation for the most critical or ambiguous scenarios.

Raif Cergibozan, Emre Akusta

Food security refers to people's access to enough safe nutritious food in order to be able to lead a healthy active life. It also involves elements such as food availability and affordability, as well as people being able to access food that can be consumed healthily. Natural disasters, however, can seriously threaten food security. Disasters' effects on food security are especially more evident in countries such as Turkiye that are frequently exposed to natural disasters due to their geologic and geographical structure. For this reason, the study investigates the effects of natural disasters on food security in Turkiye. The research first creates the Food Security Index in order to estimate the effects of natural disasters on food security. The next phase follows the process of econometric analysis, which consists of three steps. Step one of the econometric analysis uses unit root tests to check the stationarity levels of the series. The second step uses the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test to examine the long-term relationship between natural disasters and food security. The third and final step estimates the effects of natural disasters on food security. According to the obtained results, the study shows earthquakes, storms, and floods to have a significant short- as well as long-term negative effect on food security. The overall impact of natural disasters on food security has also been determined to be negative.

Georgi Markov, Jon G. Hall, Lucia Rapanotti

Many organisational problems are addressed through systemic change and re-engineering of existing Information Systems rather than radical new design. In the face of widespread IT project failure, devising effective ways to tackle this type of change remains an open challenge. This work discusses the motivation, theoretical foundation, characteristics and evaluation of a novel framework - referred to as POE-$Δ$, which is rooted in design and engineering and is aimed at providing systematic support for representing, structuring and exploring change problems of a socio-technical nature, including implementing their solutions when they exist. We generalise an existing framework of greenfield design as problem solving for application to change problems. From a theoretical perspective,POE-$Δ$ is a strict extension to its parent framework, allowing the seamless integration of greenfield and brownfield design to tackle change problems. A Design Science Research methodology was applied over a decade to define and evaluate POE-$Δ$, with significant case study research conducted to evaluate the framework in its application to real-world change problems of varying criticality and complexity. The results show that POE-$Δ$ exhibits desirable characteristics of a design approach to organisational change and can bring tangible benefits when applied in practice as a holistic and systematic approach to change in socio-technical contexts.

Feifan Ren, Jiahao Liu, Qiangqiang Huang et al.

Abstract As a main functional component of rock sheds in rockfall protection projects, traditional sand cushions have shortcomings such as heavy weight and weak buffering capacity. EPS bead-sand cushion can effectively solve these problems, but its buffering mechanism has not been fully revealed. In this study, a series of impact tests were carried out to investigate the performance of EPS bead-sand cushions with different EPS bead contents, and the evolutions of rockfall impact force, penetration depth, earth pressure, and slab vibration under single impact and multiple impacts were comparatively analyzed. The results show that with the addition of EPS beads, the maximum impact force, the peak earth pressure, and the vibration acceleration are significantly reduced. However, the cushion with high EPS bead content is at risk of being penetrated under high energy or multiple impacts, leading to excessive concentration of impact stresses. Furthermore, the EPS beads can alleviate the hardening of the sand cushion under impact through their deformation coordination, but excessive penetration should be prevented in the design of EPS bead-sand cushions. On this basis, combined with traditional sand cushion design theory, an estimation method for the maximum impact force applicable to EPS bead-sand cushion was proposed. The research results can provide a reference for the design and optimization of cushions in actual projects.

Djacinto Monteiro dos Santos, Aline M. de Oliveira, Ediclê S. F. Duarte et al.

Abstract South America has experienced severe compound drought-heatwaves (CDHW), exacerbating fires. Recently, the unprecedented Pantanal 2020 fire season (P20F), burning a third of the biome, resulted in well-reported local impacts on the ecosystem, economy, and health. Nevertheless, the long-range ripple effects of this event remain unknown. We investigated the P20F-related cascading hazards, integrating models, observational and satellite-based data. P20F-related smoke elevated PM2.5 levels in the SA’s most populated area, exceeding WHO guidelines by up to 600%. Smoke-induced air pollution episodes coincided with widespread heatwaves, amplifying health risks. The mortality burden attributable to this multi-hazard short-term (14 days) exposure was estimated to be 2150 premature deaths (21% increase above expected levels). Our findings highlight that the impacts of CDHW-fires in SA are beyond the local level, implying growing challenges for risk management and public health and the need for governance based on telecoupled flows, linking different systems over multiple scales.

Yaohui Liu, Shuchen Li, Luoning Li et al.

Karst cave causes geological disasters in tunneling engineering, which brings great risks to subway construction. The microtremor survey has become one of the main methods for karst cave detection in urban areas due to its convenience and great detection depth. However, the microtremor survey lacks high-frequency signals, resulting in poor detection accuracy on the shallow layer. An advanced method called mixed-source surface wave (MSW) method is proposed by imposing active sources during the continuous passive surface wave survey. MSW is applied to the detection of beaded karst caves (i.e. two or three karst caves at different depths in the same location) in Ji'nan, China. The influences of ambient noise, array type, and other factors on the detection accuracy were studied. Experimental results show that the detection depth and accuracy of MSW are much better than those of passive surface wave method. The inversion accuracy of linear array perpendicular to road is better than the triangle array and L-shaped array. The accuracy of the linear array along the road is worst. The detection accuracy of MSW is similar to that of combined active–passive surface wave methods. However, the basic principle of MSW is easier to understand, and its operation is more convenient. The two-dimensional measurement results show that the MSW method can well reflect the size and location of the beaded karst cave and provide important references for the practical engineering.

Simon Blouin, Alexander Herwix, Morgan Rivers et al.

Abstract The food supply chain’s heavy reliance on electricity poses significant vulnerabilities in the event of prolonged and widespread power disruptions. This study introduces a system-dynamics model that integrates five critical infrastructures—electric grid, liquid fossil fuels, Internet, transportation, and human workforce—to evaluate the resilience of food supply chains to major power outages. We validated the model using the 2019 Venezuelan blackouts as a case study, demonstrating its predictive validity. We then explored how more extreme electricity losses would disrupt the supply chain. More specifically, we modeled the impact of a large-scale cyberattack on the US electric grid and a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) event. A cyberattack severely damaging the US electric grid and allowing for recovery within a few weeks or months would lead to substantial drops in food consumption. However, it would likely still be possible to provide adequate calories to everyone, assuming that food is equitably distributed. In contrast, a year-long recovery from a HEMP event affecting most of the continental United States could precipitate a state of famine. Our analysis represents a first attempt at quantifying how food availability progressively worsens as power outages extend over time. Our open-source model is made publicly available, and we encourage its application to other catastrophic scenarios beyond those specifically considered in this work (for example, extreme solar storms, high-lethality pandemics).

ZHANG Jianyu, LYU Dunyu, LIU Songbo et al.

Objective  The mountainous and hilly areas of western Zhengzhou City have a complex geological environment, affected by rainfall and human engineering activities. Geological hazards such as collapses, landslides, and debris flows occur frequently. In particular, the “7·20” extreme rainstorm that occurred on July 20, 2021 caused many geological hazards, resulting in heavy casualties and huge economic losses. Therefore, analyzing and summarizing the development characteristics of geological hazards and conducting a risk assessment is necessary for this region. At present, the risk assessment of geological hazards is mainly conducted using a single method that has limitations including slightly low evaluation accuracy. In addition, an overall geological hazard risk assessment has not yet been conducted in the mountainous and hilly areas of western Zhengzhou City.  Methods  Based on the research and analysis of the geological environment background and the distribution characteristics of geological hazards in the study area, eight evaluation factors were selected: slope, landform, engineering geological rock group, elevation, distance from fault, distance from river, rainfall, and human engineering activities. The weighted information method which incorporates elements of the information quantity model and analytic hierarchy process, was used to evaluate the risk of geological hazards in the study area.  Results  The low-, medium-, and high-risk areas are 1387.14 km2, 1803.18 km2, and 1066.47 km2, respectively, accounting for 32.59%, 42.36%, and 25.05% of the total area, respectively. The medium- and high-risk areas are mainly distributed in the tectonic erosion medium-low mountains and loess hills in the central part of the four cities, the tectonic erosion medium-low mountains south of Dengfeng, and the loess hilly areas in northern Gongyi and Xingyang. The terrain has steep slopes and deep gullies, and the main stratigraphic lithology is clastic rocks intercalated with carbonate rocks, soft and hard rock layers, and loess. Fault structures are developed, and geological hazards are prone to occur under the action of inducing factors and are highly dangerous. The majority (93.11%) of geological hazards are distributed in medium- and high-risk areas, with hazard point densities of 0.1752 km−2 and 0.2869 km−2, respectively. The spatial distribution of geological hazard points is consistent with the geological hazard risk assessment results. The rationality of the evaluation results was assessed by a Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, yielding an AUC value of 0.868. The evaluation accuracy met the requirements for hazard assessment.  Conclusion  Geological hazards have the largest information value in the range of >40° slopes loess hilly landforms, loess engineering geological rock groups, and 24-h maximum rainfall of 500–550 mm. The risk of geological hazards is positively correlated with distance from faults and water systems — the closer the distance, the higher the risk. The risk of geological disasters in the study area is controlled by the terrain slope and landform and is closely related to the lithology of the formation, which is an important factor in inducing geological disasters. The weighted information method, which has high accuracy and rationality, was used to evaluate the geological hazard risk.   Significance  The results of this study can provide a basis and technical support for geological hazard prevention and management in the mountainous and hilly areas of western Zhengzhou City and serve as a valuable point of reference for urban planning and infrastructure geological hazard risk assessment in the study area.

Oliver Karras

In the last two decades, several researchers provided snapshots of the "current" state and evolution of empirical research in requirements engineering (RE) through literature reviews. However, these literature reviews were not sustainable, as none built on or updated previous works due to the unavailability of the extracted and analyzed data. KG-EmpiRE is a Knowledge Graph (KG) of empirical research in RE based on scientific data extracted from currently 680 papers published in the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (1994-2022). KG-EmpiRE is maintained in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), making all data openly and long-term available according to the FAIR data principles. Our long-term goal is to constantly maintain KG-EmpiRE with the research community to synthesize a comprehensive, up-to-date, and long-term available overview of the state and evolution of empirical research in RE. Besides KG-EmpiRE, we provide its analysis with all supplementary materials in a repository. This repository contains all files with instructions for replicating and (re-)using the analysis locally or via executable environments and for repeating the research approach. Since its first release based on 199 papers (2014-2022), KG-EmpiRE and its analysis have been updated twice, currently covering over 650 papers. KG-EmpiRE and its analysis demonstrate how innovative infrastructures, such as the ORKG, can be leveraged to make data from literature reviews FAIR, openly available, and maintainable for the research community in the long term. In this way, we can enable replicable, (re-)usable, and thus sustainable literature reviews to ensure the quality, reliability, and timeliness of their research results.

Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Chetan Arora

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is now a cornerstone of requirements automation. One compelling factor behind the growing adoption of NLP in Requirements Engineering (RE) is the prevalent use of natural language (NL) for specifying requirements in industry. NLP techniques are commonly used for automatically classifying requirements, extracting important information, e.g., domain models and glossary terms, and performing quality assurance tasks, such as ambiguity handling and completeness checking. With so many different NLP solution strategies available and the possibility of applying machine learning alongside, it can be challenging to choose the right strategy for a specific RE task and to evaluate the resulting solution in an empirically rigorous manner. In this chapter, we present guidelines for the selection of NLP techniques as well as for their evaluation in the context of RE. In particular, we discuss how to choose among different strategies such as traditional NLP, feature-based machine learning, and language-model-based methods. Our ultimate hope for this chapter is to serve as a stepping stone, assisting newcomers to NLP4RE in quickly initiating themselves into the NLP technologies most pertinent to the RE field.

Hao Zhang, Chau-Thuy Pham, Bin Chen et al.

Particulate matter-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and nitro-PAHs (NPAHs) were first systematically studied in downtown (XT), suburban (GL) and rural (DA) sites in winter and summer in Hanoi, Vietnam, from 2019 to 2022. The mean concentrations of PAHs and NPAHs ranged from 0.76 ng m⁻³ to 50.2 ng m⁻³ and 6.07 pg m⁻³ to 1.95 ng m⁻³, respectively. The concentrations of PAHs and NPAHs in winter were higher than in summer, except for NPAHs in XT. We found the benzo[<i>a</i>]pyrene (BaP)/benzo[<i>ghi</i>]perylene (BgPe) ratio could effectively identify biomass burning in this study, in which a higher [BaP]/[BgPe] value indicates a greater effect of biomass burning on PAHs and NPAHs. The results indicated that atmospheric PAHs and NPAHs were mainly affected by motor vehicles (especially the unique motorcycles in Southeast Asia) in the summer in Hanoi. In winter, all sites were affected by the burning of rice straw to varying degrees, especially DA. The incremental lifetime cancer risk (ILCR) in Hanoi was first determined through ingestion, inhalation and dermal absorption. The results showed that residents in Hanoi faced high health risks, while females experienced higher health risks than males. The ingestion and dermal pathways indicated higher exposure risks than the usually considered inhalation pathway.

Waheed Ullah, Waheed Ullah, Aisha Karim et al.

This study assessed spatiotemporal trends in daily monsoon precipitation extremes at seasonal and sub-seasonal scales (June, July, August, and September) and their links with atmospheric circulations over Pakistan. The study used observed precipitation data from fifty in-situ stations and reanalysis products from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and National Centers for Environmental Prediction/the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) during 1981–2018. A suite of seven extreme precipitation indices and non-parametric statistical techniques were used to infer trends in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation indices. An increase in frequency and intensity of overall extreme indices was evident, with a maximum tendency in the country’s northwestern (z-score=&gt;2.5), central, and eastern (z-score &gt; 4) monsoon-dominant parts. The northern and southwestern parts of the country exhibited a slight decrease (z-score &lt;–2) in frequency and intensity. The Sen’s Slope estimator (SSE) shows an increase in western parts (0.20 days) indicating a shift in the maxima of the monsoon precipitation. The regional precipitation shows an increase in wet days (R1 mm) with higher values of mMK (3.71) and SSE (0.3) in region 2 Similar results of moderate regional increase are evident for extreme indices except regions 1 and 3. The extreme 1-day maximum precipitation increased in region 3 (mMK: 1.39, SSE: 2.32). The extremely wet days (R99p TOT) precipitation has a moderate increase in all regions with a decrease in region 1. The temporal mutations showed dynamic changes, clearly reflecting the country’s historical extreme events. The frequency and intensity of precipitation extremes negatively correlated with the altitude (R = −0.00039). The probability density function (PDF) showed a significant increase in the density during June and September with a probabilistic positive shift during July and August. The intensified mid-latitude westerlies and subtropical zonal easterlies teleconnections, strengthening of the monsoon trough, and land-ocean thermal contrast are the potential drivers of the increasing trend in precipitation extremes. The current study could serve as a benchmark for future researchers and policymakers to devise effective mitigation strategies for sustainable development.

Ashleigh Massam, Helen Smith, Valeriya Filipova et al.

Abstract A novel approach to consider local‐scale defence infrastructure in an urban environment, coupled with a broadscale hydraulic model framework, is applied to the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Broadscale hydraulic modelling frameworks are often able to employ more complex models, but are typically limited to homogenous decision‐making to ensure standardised outputs across large regions. Conversely, small‐scale hydraulic modelling frameworks tend to better integrate local‐scale features but can be computationally expensive to scale up beyond a regional view. Improvements to the broadscale hydraulic model framework through the incorporation of defence systems yield a more accurate representation of fluvial flood risk. This study incorporates defences in Kuala Lumpur, yielding a reduction in our estimates of fluvial flood extent by around 40%. The results of this study are validated against a set of high‐quality observations, demonstrating the capability of the model framework in capturing flood risk in more than 95% of known flood risk zones in the city. Incorporating defence infrastructure using data‐driven decision making and existing functionality in the hydraulic model could be automated in future model builds. This new approach bridges the gap between local‐scale model frameworks and the broadscale, homogenous 2D hydraulic modelling studies.

Xiaoxuan Kong, Haifeng Lu, Chongyang Liu et al.

Early warning of natural disasters (earthquakes and landslides) and engineering disasters (mining and tunnel collapse) has always been a complex problem in the field of engineering. In the current paper, the uniaxial compression loading tests of rock specimens are methodically observed by employing strain data acquisition equipment and an infrared thermal imager. By examining the variation pattern of strain field and temperature field data before rock damage, a critical damage identification method in conjunction with the strain and temperature data analysis is proposed. The corresponding time of total failure under the action of uniaxial compression is rationally determined by the strain data variation from increasing to decreasing in a 45-degree direction, and the location of the crack is predicted based on the slope of the tangent line of the strain curve in x- and y-direction at the failure time. Additionally, the slowing down of the temperature growth trend at the monitoring point and the significant variation of the local temperature over a short period in the infrared thermal image could be utilized as precursory characteristics for the rock damage. These research findings could be very beneficial in predicting the early warning of the surrounding rock instability in geotechnical engineering.

Su-Ju Lu, Yu-Chiao Lin, K. Tan et al.

In light of a recent spike in natural and man-made disasters, there has been an increase in interest in disaster prevention education and training. The effectiveness of both publicly-funded and voluntarily organized disaster education (DE) has attracted wide attention. More studies are needed to understand the innovative pedagogical practice and the impact of technological advances on disaster learning content development, effectiveness and motivation. This study investigates the application of augmented reality (AR) in DE and training. An AR-enhanced tool named ‘disaster-proof warrior’ was developed and tested to evaluate its enhancement effect on learning under two collaborative learning modes. A series of quasi-experiments involving 85 elementary school subjects was carried out to assess the learning effectiveness and the subjective reaction in learning motivation. The results showed the AR embedded learning tool is effective in engaging and motivating collaborative team knowledge building. This study adds to the existing literature of AR applications in education and training as well as providing a useful reference for future development and improvement of national DE and training.