Civil engineering articles within Nature Communications

Featured

• Article
  19 March 2020 | Open Access

  New insights into US flood vulnerability revealed from flood insurance big data

  Economic estimates of flood damages rely on depth–damage functions that are inadequately verified. Here, the authors assessed flood vulnerability in the US and found that current depth–damage functions consist of disparate relationships that match poorly with observations which better follow a bimodal beta distribution.

  • Oliver E. J. Wing
  • , Nicholas Pinter
  •  & Carolyn Kousky

• Article
  29 August 2019 | Open Access

  Field theory for recurrent mobility

  Systematic methods to characterize human mobility can lead to more accurate forecasting of epidemic spreading and better urban planning. Here the authors present a methodology to analyse daily commuting data by representing it with an irrotational vector field and a corresponding scalar potential.

  • Mattia Mazzoli
  • , Alex Molas
  •  & José J. Ramasco

• Article
  16 April 2019 | Open Access

  Microbial and metabolic succession on common building materials under high humidity conditions

  Microbes inhabit built environments and could contribute to degradation of surfaces especially in damp conditions. Here the authors explore how communities of microbes and their metabolites affect four types of built surfaces under varying environmental conditions.

  • Simon Lax
  • , Cesar Cardona
  •  & Jack A. Gilbert

• Article
  16 March 2018 | Open Access

  Archimedes’ law explains penetration of solids into granular media

  The penetration dynamics of solid objects into granular media has been described by theories that are constrained to the use of phenomenological models or empirical parameters. Here, Kang et al. propose and test a parameter-free model for the dependence of the resistance force on penetration depth.

  • Wenting Kang
  • , Yajie Feng
  •  & Raphael Blumenfeld

• Article
  08 November 2017 | Open Access

  River-bed armouring as a granular segregation phenomenon

  River beds often exhibit armouring, in which formation of a coarse surface layer shields the finer underlying grains from erosion. Here, using experiments in a laboratory river and discrete and continuum models, the authors demonstrate that river-bed armouring is driven by vertical granular segregation.

  • Behrooz Ferdowsi
  • , Carlos P. Ortiz
  •  & Douglas J. Jerolmack

• Article
  07 July 2017 | Open Access

  Understanding extreme sea levels for broad-scale coastal impact and adaptation analysis

  Uncertainties in contemporary extreme sea levels (ESL) from mean sea level rise (SLR) projections have been overlooked in broad-scale risk and adaptation studies. Here, the authors quantify the uncertainties in present-day global ESL estimates and find that they exceed those from global SLR projections.

  • T. Wahl
  • , I. D. Haigh
  •  & A. B. A. Slangen