Engineering Commons^™

The Year The West Was Burning: How The 2020 Wildfire Season Got So Extreme, Mojtaba Sadegh, Ata Akbari Asanjan, Mohammad Reza Alizadeh

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

More than 4 million acres of California went up in flames in 2020 – about 4% of the state’s land area and more than double its previous wildfire record. Five of the state’s six largest fires on record were burning this year.

In Colorado, the Pine Gulch fire broke the record for that state’s largest wildfire, only to be surpassed by two larger blazes, the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires.

Oregon saw one of the most destructive fire seasons in its recorded history, with more than 4,000 homes destroyed.

What caused the 2020 fire season to become so extreme?

Impacts Of Compaction Load And Procedure On Stress-Deformation Behaviors Of A Soil Geosynthetic Composite (Sgc) Mass—A Case Study, Meenwah Gui, Truc Phan, Thang Pham

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Fill compaction in the construction of Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil (GRS) mass is typically performed by operating a vibratory or roller compactor, which in turns imposed a compaction load in direction perpendicular to the wall face. The compaction process resulted in the development of the so-called compaction-induced stress (CIS), which may subsequently increase the stiffness and strength of the fill material. Compaction process is normally simulated using one of the following compaction procedures—(i) a uniformly distributed load acting on the top surface of each soil lift, (ii) a uniformly distributed load acting on the top and bottom surface of each soil …

South Texas Coastal Area Storm Surge Model Development And Improvement, Sara E. Davila, Cesar Davila Hernandez, Martin Flores, Jungseok Ho

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The intensification of climatic changes, mainly natural geophysical hazards like hurricanes, are of great interest to the South Texas region. Scientists and engineers must protect essential resources from coastal threats, such as storm surge. This study presents the development process and improvements of a hydrodynamic finite element model that covers the South Texas coast, specifically the Lower Laguna Madre, for the aid of local emergency management teams. Four historical tropical cyclone landfalls are evaluated and used as a means of verification of the hydrodynamic model simulation results. The parameters used to improve the accuracy of the model are the tidal …