Conference Papers

Mexico City suffers extensive damage from large earthquakes that originate at far distances due mainly to densely built areas on a filled lakebed. Seismic design codes in Mexico recognize the site-specific issues in Mexico City by acknowledging zones that represent lakebed as being riskier compared to other Mexico City areas. At the time of the 19 September 1985 M8.1 Michoacán Earthquake...

Earthquake-induced secondary ground failure hazards, such as liquefaction and landslides, result in catastrophic building and infrastructure damage as well as human fatalities. To facilitate emergency responses and mitigate losses, the U.S. Geological Survey provides a rapid hazard estimation system for earthquake-triggered landslides and liquefaction using geospatial susceptibility...

Multi-period response spectra (MPRS) are incorporated in the development of seismic design ground motions in the 2020 edition of the NEHRP Recommended Seismic Provisions for New Buildings and Other Structures (2020 NEHRP Provisions) and are approved for adoption in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Standard, Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and...

Initial alerts by PAGER (Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response) within minutes following an earthquake include several uncertainties, mainly due to potential inaccuracies in location, depth, fault delineation, and shaking estimates. We enhance an updating framework by incorporating early reports of fatalities within the first 24 hours, or so, of an earthquake to update...

Introduction Although the Petersburg Granite had long been in practical use as a building stone since the 1830s (Watson, 1906; 1907; 1910; Darton, 1911; Steidtmann, 1945), it was first formally defined as a geologic unit by Anna Jonas on the 1928 geologic map of Virginia. Anna Jonas defined this unit as a Precambrian coarse-grained porphyritic biotite granite that was intruded by finer...

Prioritisation of mine pollution sources for remediation is a key challenge facing environmental managers. This paper presents a numerical modelling methodology to evaluate potential improvements in stream water quality from remediation of important mine pollution sources. High spatial resolution synoptic sampling data from a Welsh watershed were used to calibrate the OTIS solute...

USACE partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, United States Geological Survey, and Texas A&M University to evaluate the erodibility of the river banks and levees to inform probabilistic numerical simulations using the Bank Stability and Toe Erosion Model (BSTEM). This paper, the second of two parts, addresses processing the collected...

USACE partnered with the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, United States Geological Survey, and Texas A&M University to evaluate the erodibility of the river banks and levees to inform probabilistic numerical simulations using the Bank Stability and Toe Erosion Model (BSTEM). This paper discusses the measurement of the intrinsic erosion and...

Urban development and associated land cover transitions alter the thermal and physical properties of the land surface, resulting the temperature in urban area higher than in rural area or urban heat island (UHI). Remote sensing and land cover data is usually used to assess UHI intensity and temporal change trends. In this study, we implemented a prototype approach to characterize the UHI...

The rapid technological development of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) has led to an increase in capabilities of aerial image collection and analysis for monitoring a variety of wildlife species including waterfowl. Biologists mainly rely on conducting ocular surveys from fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters to estimate waterfowl abundance. sUAS provide an alternative that is safer...

Developing fast and accurate surrogates for physics-based coastal and ocean mod- els is an urgent need due to the coastal flood risk under accelerating sea level rise, and the computational expense of deterministic numerical models. For this purpose, we develop the first digital twin of Earth coastlines with new physics-informed machine learning techniques extending the state-of-art...

This paper proposes a new physics-guided machine learning approach that incorporates the scientific knowledge in physics-based models into machine learning models. Physics-based models are widely used to study dynamical systems in a variety of scientific and engineering problems. Although they are built based on general physical laws that govern the relations from input to output...