{"title":"A hybrid framework for regional climate seasonality study and trend analysis","authors":"Masooma Suleman, Peter A. Khaiter","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106429","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106429","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>One of the profound effects produced by climate change is shifting the seasons in terms of both duration and start/end dates. It is important for sustainable management to detect and predict any such seasonal changes as they may trigger earlier-than-usual timing of plant phenology, animal migration, and other ecological, environmental, economic, and social implications. In this study, we are using meteorological data recorded in four cities across Southern Ontario, Canada over the past 70 years (1953–2022) to explore regional relationship between climate variables and seasonal shifts. Applying a combination of statistical and machine learning (ML) algorithms, a novel hybrid framework is suggested for detecting, quantifying, and visualizing seasonal clusters and trends. A comparative analysis of different ML clustering algorithms to identify variations in seasonality timing and to establish phenological seasons is conducted. The resultant seasonal clusters are then used to detect shifts in seasonality dynamics and trends in climate parameters.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106429"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143678383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shikang Du , Siyu Chen , Shanling Cheng , Jiaqi He , Dan Zhao , Xusheng Zhu , Lulu Lian , Xingxing Tu , Qinghong Zhao , Yue Zhang
{"title":"Dust storm detection for ground-based stations with imbalanced machine learning","authors":"Shikang Du , Siyu Chen , Shanling Cheng , Jiaqi He , Dan Zhao , Xusheng Zhu , Lulu Lian , Xingxing Tu , Qinghong Zhao , Yue Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106420","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106420","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Dust storms, common meteorological hazard in arid and semi-arid regions, have significant environmental and societal impacts. Rapid and accurate detecting dust storms is critical for early warning systems. Over the past few decades, dust storm detection primarily relied on satellite remote sensing techniques using multi-channel imagery, but these methods have limitations in temporal resolution. With the recent expansion of China's observation network, the dense distribution of ground-based sensors offers a promising data source for real-time dust storm detection. This study proposes a machine learning approach to detect dust storms using ground-based sensor networks. By combining undersampling strategies and ensemble algorithms, this method improves model's performance in detecting dust storms. Compared with the state-of-the-art models, this approach improves the Recall rates for different dust storm levels by 24.32% and the G-Mean by 18.58%, achieving superior dust storm detection performance. This approach can offer the near-real-time, hourly updated dust storm detection products.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106420"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143637426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"PyTorchFire: A GPU-accelerated wildfire simulator with Differentiable Cellular Automata","authors":"Zeyu Xia , Sibo Cheng","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106401","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106401","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Accurate and rapid prediction of wildfire trends is crucial for effective management and mitigation. However, the stochastic nature of fire propagation poses significant challenges in developing reliable simulators. In this paper, we introduce <span>PyTorchFire</span>, an open-access, <span>PyTorch</span>-based software that leverages GPU acceleration. With our redesigned differentiable wildfire Cellular Automata (CA) model, we achieve millisecond-level computational efficiency, significantly outperforming traditional CPU-based wildfire simulators on real-world-scale fires at high resolution. Real-time parameter calibration is made possible through gradient descent on our model, aligning simulations closely with observed wildfire behavior both temporally and spatially, thereby enhancing the realism of the simulations. Our <span>PyTorchFire</span> simulator, combined with real-world environmental data, demonstrates superior generalizability compared to supervised learning surrogate models. Its ability to predict and calibrate wildfire behavior in real-time ensures accuracy, stability, and efficiency. <span>PyTorchFire</span> has the potential to revolutionize wildfire simulation, serving as a powerful tool for wildfire prediction and management.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106401"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143592244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yifan Zhang, Mengyu Ma, Jun Li, Anran Yang, Qingren Jia, Zebang Liu
{"title":"Efficient and fine-grained viewshed analysis in a three-dimensional urban complex environment","authors":"Yifan Zhang, Mengyu Ma, Jun Li, Anran Yang, Qingren Jia, Zebang Liu","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106359","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106359","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Performing efficient and fine-grained viewshed analysis in 3D complex urban models, particularly when handling large-scale datasets, presents a significant challenge in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Existing methods are primarily designed for 2.5D raster models and struggle to effectively manage large-scale data. Furthermore, the commonly utilized approaches for 3D models need large display memory and lack statistical analyses. To address these challenges, this paper adopted a results-oriented approach that diverged from the traditional data-driven paradigm by reformulating the conventional viewshed computation problem as a spatial query problem. Building on this premise, we proposed the Q-View method for oblique photogrammetry data, which involved creating an indexing model for large-scale datasets and enabled parallel querying between the line-of-sight (LOS) and the model. The Q-View method enables efficient and spatially exhaustive analysis, effectively overcoming the complexities associated with traditional viewshed computations. Experimental results showed that our approach achieved a query rate of up to 4 million visibility queries per second on a dataset with 17.6 million triangular meshes. Compared to the latest methods, it offered a 72.45% improvement in operational efficiency and superior accuracy relative to the GPU-rated method. These findings indicated that the proposed method substantially improved both the accuracy and efficiency of viewshed analysis in complex urban environments, providing decision support for urban planning and environmental monitoring.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106359"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143577051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jeffery S. Horsburgh , Scott Black , Anthony Castronova , Pabitra K. Dash
{"title":"Advancing open and reproducible water data science by integrating data analytics with an online data repository","authors":"Jeffery S. Horsburgh , Scott Black , Anthony Castronova , Pabitra K. Dash","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106422","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106422","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Scientific and management challenges in the water domain require synthesis of diverse data. Many analysis tasks are difficult because datasets are large and complex, standard formats are not always agreed upon or mapped to efficient data structures, scientists may lack training for tackling large and complex datasets, and it can be difficult to share and reproduce data science workflows. Overcoming barriers to accessing, organizing, and preparing datasets for analyses can transform how water scientists work. Building on the HydroShare repository's cyberinfrastructure, we created a Python package that automates data retrieval, organization, and curation for analysis, reducing time spent in choosing appropriate data structures and writing data ingestion code. It manages metadata and automates data loading into performant structures consistent with Python's visualization, analysis, and data science capabilities and can be used to build and share more reproducible scientific workflows in HydroShare following FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106422"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143620282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Can large language models effectively reason about adverse weather conditions?","authors":"Nima Zafarmomen , Vidya Samadi","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106421","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106421","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper seeks to answer the question “can Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively reason about adverse weather conditions?”. To address this question, we utilized multiple LLMs to harness the US National Weather Service (NWS) flood report data spanning from June 2005 to September 2024. Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer (BART), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA-2), LLaMA-3, and LLaMA-3.1 were employed to categorize data based on predefined labels. The methodology was implemented in Charleston County, South Carolina, USA. Extreme events were unevenly distributed across the training period with the “Cyclonic” category exhibiting significantly fewer instances compared to the “Flood” and “Thunderstorm” categories. Analysis suggests that the LLaMA-3 reached its peak performance at 60% of the dataset size while other LLMs achieved peak performance at approximately 80–100% of the dataset size. This study provided deep insights into the application of LLMs in reasoning adverse weather conditions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106421"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143610213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An efficient modern convolution-based dynamic spatiotemporal deep learning architecture for ozone prediction","authors":"Ao Li, Ji Li, Zhizhang Shen","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106424","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106424","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Ozone pollution threatens ecosystems and human health, necessitating accurate forecasting for better management and policy implementation. To address this, we developed O3ConvNet, a convolution-based dynamic spatiotemporal deep learning model. It incorporates ModernTCN, a multivariate time series feature module, and a spatial message passing module using a dynamic adjacency matrix with geographic and DTW-based distances. O3ConvNet balances performance and efficiency across datasets with varying station densities and data qualities. In Los Angeles, the mean absolute error ranges from 6.984 μg/m<sup>3</sup> to 15.990 μg/m<sup>3</sup> for 1-h to 24-h predictions, with <em>R</em><sup>2</sup> values exceeding 0.937. Computational time is reduced by up to 82% compared to the best baseline model. In Wuxi, China, it improves prediction accuracy by 18% and efficiency by 81%. ModernTCN module identifies critical factors for ozone formation, while the dynamic adjacency matrix helps extract spatial dependencies effectively. Overall, this study introduces a robust and generalizable model for regional ozone predictions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106424"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143600157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Junhao Wu , Xi Chen , Jinghan Dong , Nen Tan , Xiaoping Liu , Antonis Chatzipavlis , Philip LH. Yu , Adonis Velegrakis , Yining Wang , Yonggui Huang , Heqin Cheng , Diankai Wang
{"title":"Dissolved oxygen prediction in the Dianchi River basin with explainable artificial intelligence based on physical prior knowledge","authors":"Junhao Wu , Xi Chen , Jinghan Dong , Nen Tan , Xiaoping Liu , Antonis Chatzipavlis , Philip LH. Yu , Adonis Velegrakis , Yining Wang , Yonggui Huang , Heqin Cheng , Diankai Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106412","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106412","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Dissolved oxygen (DO) is a critical parameter for monitoring water quality. However, most existing deep learning models have overlooked the physical relationship between DO and other parameters during simulation, leading to simulated values that deviate from the actual physical laws. Moreover, the inherent opacity of deep learning models restricts their applicability. Here, we propose the prior knowledge-constrained bidirectional long short-term memory network (PKBiLSTM) model to simulate DO levels in the Dianchi Lake basin. Our results show that the PKBiLSTM model achieves an average Kling-Gupta efficiency coefficient (KGE) of 0.926, which represents a 3.35% and 2.38% increase compared to the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and categorical boosting (CatBoost) models, respectively. The experiments reveal that pH has the greatest effect on DO concentration within the range of 6.5–10. Furthermore, the primary factors affecting DO exhibit seasonal differences. The findings underscore the potential of our method to enhance the scientific management of watersheds.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106412"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143577046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Simulation decomposition analysis of the Iowa food-water-energy system","authors":"Taeho Jeong , Mariia Kozlova , Leifur Thor Leifsson , Julian Scott Yeomans","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106415","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106415","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study applies global sensitivity analysis (GSA) to the Iowa Food-Water-Energy system, focusing on nitrogen export into the Mississippi River. A binning method combined with <em>simulation decomposition</em> (SimDec) quantifies and visualizes the influence of crucial aggregate input variables — manure nitrogen (MN), commercial nitrogen (CN), grain nitrogen (GN), and fixation nitrogen (FN) — on nitrogen surplus (NS) at the county level. Unlike traditional Sobol’ indices, the binning method captures dependent variables. In addition, the SimDec procedure provides a detailed visual representation of how these dependencies and interactions drive the nitrogen variability. MN is identified as the most influential factor, followed by CN, with FN and GN having less impact. The study also performs GSA on the low-level input variables, enhancing the overall interpretability of the sensitivity analysis. This approach offers actionable insights for improving nitrogen management practices and contributes to GSA literature by showcasing the analysis of aggregate variables.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106415"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143577047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bekir Z. Demiray , Yusuf Sermet , Enes Yildirim , Ibrahim Demir
{"title":"FloodGame: An interactive 3D serious game on flood mitigation for disaster awareness and education","authors":"Bekir Z. Demiray , Yusuf Sermet , Enes Yildirim , Ibrahim Demir","doi":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106418","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106418","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The number and devastating impacts of natural disasters have grown significantly worldwide, and floods are one of the most dangerous and frequent natural disasters. Recent studies emphasize the importance of public awareness in disaster preparedness and response activities. FloodGame is designed as a web-based interactive serious game geared towards educating K-12 and college students and raising public awareness on flood prevention and mitigation strategies so that they are more informed about the implications of future floods. A web-based interactive gaming environment with rich 3D visuals and models is developed that allows users to experiment with different flood mitigation strategies for a real-world location of their choice. This immersive, repeatable, and engaging experience will allow students and the public to comprehend the consequences of individual mitigation measures, build a conceptual understanding of the benefits of mitigation actions, and examine how floods may occur in their communities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":310,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Modelling & Software","volume":"188 ","pages":"Article 106418"},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143629600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}