Earthquake-induced landslide prediction using back-propagation type artificial neural network: case study in northern Iran

Natural Hazards - Landslides can cause extensive damage, particularly those triggered by earthquakes. The current study used back propagation of an artificial neural network (ANN) to conduct risk...     

Historical evidence of climate change impact on drought outlook in river basins: analysis of annual maximum drought severities through daily SPI definitions

In the context of major outcomes of a steadily changing climate, extreme climatic conditions and the associated events in various forms of weather-related natural disasters, e.g. droughts, floods, and heat waves, are more frequently experienced on the global scale in recent years. In support of this argument, there are adequate numbers of explicit signals over such a persistent outlook, which is greatly illustrated by historical data and observations. This study, which is mainly oriented to investigating the drought behaviour in Thracian, Aegean and Mediterranean transects of Turkey's major river basins, is actually inspired by the foreseen potential of using annual maximum drought severity series (based on drought definition through the standardized precipitation index (SPI)) within a framework that resembles the use of flood discharge directly from flow measurements in a river basin. To this end, a series of spatial analyses were employed to identify different aspects of flood appearance in the study extent, including trend views on annual average drought severity series, shifts in the starting time of the annually most severe flood periods, and changes in spatial coverage views of average drought conditions under different drought severity categories. The framework of the analytical approaches depends greatly on validated international datasets and open-source computational algorithms. The results from the analyses that were conducted in two consecutive periods of 1958–1980 and 1981–2004 revealed that Turkey's western and southern river basin systems seemed to have experienced quite different behaviours between the two periods in terms of drought severity magnitudes, drought durations and annual occurrence times.

     

Flood vulnerability and buildings’ flood exposure assessment in a densely urbanised city: comparative analysis of three scenarios using a neural network approach

Natural Hazards - Advances in the availability of multi-sensor, remote sensing-derived datasets, and machine learning algorithms can now provide an unprecedented possibility to predict flood events...     

Prediction of Rock Abrasivity Index (RAI) and Uniaxial Compressive Strength (UCS) of Granite Building Stones Using Nondestructive Tests

Geotechnical and Geological Engineering - Rock abrasivity index (RAI) and uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) are two key parameters for assessing abrasivity and durability of building stones,...