2026-10-14

7 arXiv categories· 96 journals· 3796 candidates — 8 worth your time· 49 without an open abstract

Headline

Compound heatwaves, safe curve speeds, conflict geography, and travel diary synthesis

Today, together

tag shift
no tag ran above its 30-day average
shares references
no items share references today counted over the 8 papers published above
on the same shoulders
no foundation work was cited by four of the day's papers counted over the 49 of this day's 57 named papers whose reference lists we have — standing on the same older work is not the same as being about the same thing
first appearance
Instituto Mora; Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación; Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai); and 2 more none of them on a paper we published in the 124 days before this issue

Two counts, not one counted twice: every row here but “on the same shoulders” counts the papers published above, and that one counts every paper this day named — those and the ones under Also published today, whose abstracts we could not read.

A Digital Twin–Based Simulation Framework for Safe Curve Speed Estimation Using Unity developed a physics-driven digital twin framework to calculate maximum safe driving speeds along horizontal road curves. Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience across North America introduced a comparative framework to analyze how compound climate hazards trigger domino effects across interconnected urban infrastructure systems. A new frontier of climate risk used a 25 km global gridded dataset from 1982 to 2023 to assess compound marine-terrestrial heatwaves across Small Island Developing States.

published: Applied Geography

Chunzhu Wei, Xufeng Liu, Haiyan Liu, et al.
Applied Geography

Sun Yat-sen University

Climate variability and models · Climate Change and Environmental Impact · Climate Change and Health Impacts · Sun Yat-sen University · Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) · Chinese Academy of Sciences

A new frontier of climate risk: Compound marine–terrestrial heatwaves and their growing impact on Small Island Developing States

Using a 25 km global gridded dataset spanning 1982 to 2023, this study assessed compound marine-terrestrial heatwaves across Small Island Developing States via Event Coincidence Analysis. Summer frequencies, durations, and intensities peaked between 1998 and 2010 (reaching 15.58 events in 1998, 17.08 days in 2006, and 0.69 °C in 2004) before falling to 4.73 events, 8.0 days, and 0.40 °C by 2023. Saint Lucia displayed the highest heatwave co-occurrence probability at 51.15%, while coastal population exposure rose in regions like Grenada, Kiribati, and Niue.

Why it matters — It establishes the historical baseline and spatial variation of dual land-sea extreme thermal events for small island nations, revealing that thermal coincidence risk is heavily concentrated in Northern Hemisphere islands and lower-humidity Pacific zones.

Applied Geography · doi

published: Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board

A. al Rahman, M Sabbir Salek, Mashrur Chowdhury, et al.
Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board · was arXiv

Clemson University

Traffic and Road Safety · Transportation Systems and Logistics · Traffic control and management · digital twin · Clemson University

A Digital Twin–Based Simulation Framework for Safe Curve Speed Estimation Using Unity

This study developed a physics-driven digital twin framework in the Unity engine to calculate maximum safe driving speeds along horizontal road curves. The model incorporates roadway geometric and elevation data alongside a parameterized vehicle model adjusting for mass, center of gravity, and acceleration. Simulated speed thresholds matched real-world speeds recorded via a radar gun across diverse weather conditions at a physical test curve.

Why it matters — It provides a vehicle- and environment-specific alternative to standard AASHTO safe curve speed equations, which rely on conservative point-mass simplifications.

Caveat: Validation was conducted on a single physical road curve, which limits evidence of generalizability across varied geometric designs.

Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board · doi

published: Discover Cities

Simone Lucatello, Blas L. Pérez Henríquez
Discover Cities

Instituto Mora

Disaster Management and Resilience · Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance · United States · Los Angeles · Instituto Mora

Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience across North America

This study introduces a comparative framework to analyze how compound climate hazards trigger domino effects across interconnected energy, water, transit, health, and housing infrastructure. The authors evaluate these cascading risks across eight North American cities—Los Angeles, New Orleans, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, Monterrey, Acapulco, and Veracruz–Boca del Río—to assess how local governance, fiscal resources, and social inequality mediate disaster impacts. Findings demonstrate a widespread mismatch where complex, multi-sector climate shocks are managed by fragmented regional institutions and isolated funding streams.

Why it matters — It shifts urban climate planning away from single-hazard models by establishing how institutional silos and fiscal constraints directly exacerbate physical infrastructure failures during multi-hazard events.

Caveat: The framework relies on a qualitative review of selected urban case studies rather than empirical risk modeling or quantitative stress testing of specific infrastructure networks.

Discover Cities · doi

preprint

Steven M. Radil, Olivier J. Walther, Mohammed Sanda
arXiv stat.AP

Changing Geographies of Violence in North and West Africa

Spatial analysis of armed conflict trends across North and West Africa shows a regional surge in violence for 2025, heavily concentrated in Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Utilizing an OECD/SWAC spatial indicator, the study demonstrates that violence is escalating rapidly from core hotspots directly into peripheral regions without an intervening low-intensity phase. Projections for 2026 forecast over 15,000 violent incidents and 32,500 fatalities, driven largely by expanding clashes in Nigeria alongside rising deaths in Mali.

Why it matters — This refutes the assumption that violence spreads gradually toward the coast as a unified front, establishing instead that conflict expands rapidly outward from existing dense clusters while coastal risks remain primarily driven by local disputes.

Caveat: The primary regional projections for 2026 rely on predictive modeling rather than observed historical incident logs.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Angelina Liu, Mengqiu Cao, Sen Pei, et al.
arXiv physics.soc-ph

Hurricane recovery gaps lie in reconnection, not local restart

Analysis of device-based mobility data during Hurricanes Helene and Milton reveals that local activity resumed in roughly 4.5 days across all areas. However, external reconnection varied significantly, taking 5 days in coastal-urban Florida compared to 11 days in inland-rural Appalachia.

Why it matters — Disaster recovery efforts typically focus on immediate local restoration, but these findings demonstrate that rural inequality stems specifically from prolonged external isolation, requiring planners to reorient assistance toward inter-regional links.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Malithi Nawarathne, Nadeesha Herath Mudiyanselage, Lihini Sangeetha
arXiv cs.CV

Disaster Management and Resilience · Flood Risk Assessment and Management · Safety and Risk Management · spatial analysis · GeoPandas · Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology

Global Disaster Risk Assessment Using World Risk Index Data: A Geospatial and Visual Analytics Approach

The study mapped national-level disaster risk from 2000 to 2025 using World Risk Index datasets processed through Python geospatial tools. Visualizations identified the Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia, and India as consistently recording the highest risk scores based on their exposure, vulnerability, and coping capacities.

Why it matters — It transforms multi-decadal aggregate risk index records into dynamic spatial visualizations that highlight persistent global disaster hotspots requiring prioritized preparedness.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Pascal Jutras-Dubé, Raziq Zaman, Fabian Bastin, et al.
arXiv cs.LG

travel survey

Masked Diffusion for Travel Diaries Synthesis

The authors developed DiaryBridge, a masked diffusion model that converts household travel survey records into single token sequences containing variable counts of persons, vehicles, and trip chains. Evaluated on the 2017/2018 Regional Travel Survey of the Baltimore region, the unified model handles both full synthetic generation and conditional completion of partial travel diaries while capturing intra-household shared trips. It outperformed learned baselines at matching aggregate demand distributions across travel modes, trip purposes, and departure times.

Why it matters — This approach replaces multi-step or truncated vector pipelines with a single sequence model, preserving cross-member dependencies and household structures that traditional travel survey synthesis methods break.

Caveat: The model was evaluated on data from a single metropolitan region's travel survey.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Chao Li, Renhe Jiang, Chuan Xiao, et al.
arXiv cs.AI

large language model · New York City

Encounter-Driven City-Scale Human Mobility Generation with Large Language Models

EncounterMob uses large language models with a coarse-to-fine Encounter Generator and an Iterative Coupling Framework to generate city-scale human mobility while maintaining population co-occurrence patterns. Evaluated on datasets from Japan and New York City, the model reduced participant-time-venue joint error by 40.4% and 41.7% and mean personal mobility error by 58.8% and 32.7% compared to the ELLMob baseline.

Why it matters — Generative mobility models can now reproduce both individual movement patterns and collective, spatio-temporal population encounter structures simultaneously.

arXiv · pdf

Still cited

Sarah Perkins‐Kirkpatrick, Sophie C. Lewis (2020), Increasing trends in regional heatwaves 1 of today's items cite it · 10 of 3240 in the archive stand on it

Also published today

These appeared today in journals we track. Their abstracts are not openly available, so we cannot summarise them.