Aswathi Mundayatt

Aswathi Mundayatt, Jaya Sreevalsan-Nair

Existing multi-hazard susceptibility mapping (MHSM) studies often rely on spatially uniform models, treat hazards independently, and provide limited representation of cross-hazard dependence and uncertainty. To address these limitations, this study proposes a deep learning (DL) workflow for joint flood-landslide multi-hazard susceptibility mapping (FL-MHSM) that combines two-level spatial partitioning, probabilistic Early Fusion (EF), a tree-based Late Fusion (LF) baseline, and a soft-gating Mixture of Experts (MoE) model, with MoE serving as final predictive model. The proposed design preserves spatial heterogeneity through zonal partitions and enables data-parallel large-area prediction using overlapping lattice grids. In Kerala, EF remained competitive with LF, improving flood recall from 0.816 to 0.840 and reducing Brier score from 0.092 to 0.086, while MoE provided strongest performance for flood susceptibility, achieving an AUC-ROC of 0.905, recall of 0.930, and F1-score of 0.722. In Nepal, EF similarly improved flood recall from 0.820 to 0.858 and reduced Brier score from 0.057 to 0.049 relative to LF, while MoE outperformed both EF and LF for landslide susceptibility, achieving an AUC-ROC of 0.914, recall of 0.901, and F1-score of 0.559. GeoDetector analysis of MoE outputs further showed that dominant factors varied more across zones in Kerala, where susceptibility was shaped by different combinations of topographic, land-cover, and drainage-related controls, while Nepal showed a more consistent influence of topographic and glacier-related factors across zones. These findings show that EF and LF provide complementary predictive behavior, and that their spatially adaptive integration through MoE yields robust overall predictive performance for FL-MHSM while supporting interpretable characterization of multi-hazard susceptibility in spatially heterogeneous landscapes.

Jaya Sreevalsan-Nair, Aswathi Mundayatt

Data-driven susceptibility mapping of natural hazards has harnessed the advances in classification methods used on heterogeneous sources represented as raster images. Susceptibility mapping is an important step towards risk assessment for any natural hazard. Increasingly, multiple hazards co-occur spatially, temporally, or both, which calls for an in-depth study on multi-hazard susceptibility mapping. In recent years, single-hazard susceptibility mapping algorithms have become well-established and have been extended to multi-hazard susceptibility mapping. Deep learning is also emerging as a promising method for single-hazard susceptibility mapping. Here, we discuss the evolution of methods for a single hazard, their extensions to multi-hazard maps as a late fusion of decisions, and the use of deep learning methods in susceptibility mapping. We finally propose a vision for adapting data fusion strategies in multimodal deep learning to multi-hazard susceptibility mapping. From the background study of susceptibility methods, we demonstrate that deep learning models are promising, untapped methods for multi-hazard susceptibility mapping. Data fusion strategies provide a larger space of deep learning models applicable to multi-hazard susceptibility mapping.

Brij Bidhin Desai, Yukta Arvind Rajapur, Aswathi Mundayatt et al.

Urban air pollution poses significant risks to public health, environmental sustainability, and policy planning. Effective air quality management requires predictive tools that can integrate diverse datasets and communicate complex spatial and temporal pollution patterns. There is a gap in interactive tools with seamless integration of forecasting and visualization of spatial distributions of air pollutant concentrations. We present CityAQVis, an interactive machine learning ML sandbox tool designed to predict and visualize pollutant concentrations at the ground level using multi-source data, which includes satellite observations, meteorological parameters, population density, elevation, and nighttime lights. While traditional air quality visualization tools often lack forecasting capabilities, CityAQVis enables users to build and compare predictive models, visualizing the model outputs and offering insights into pollution dynamics at the ground level. The pilot implementation of the tool is tested through case studies predicting nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations in metropolitan regions, highlighting its adaptability to various pollutants. Through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), the user can perform comparative visualizations of the spatial distribution of surface-level pollutant concentration in two different urban scenarios. Our results highlight the potential of ML-driven visual analytics to improve situational awareness and support data-driven decision-making in air quality management.

Vidhu Arora, Shreyan Gupta, Ananthakrishna Kudupu et al.

In this article, we improve the deep learning solution for coastline extraction from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images by proposing a two-stage model involving image classification followed by segmentation. We hypothesize that a single segmentation model usually used for coastline detection is insufficient to characterize different coastline types. We demonstrate that the need for a two-stage workflow prevails through different compression levels of these images. Our results from experiments using a combination of CNN and U-Net models on Sentinel-1 images show that the two-stage workflow, coastline classification-extraction from SAR images (CCESAR) outperforms a single U-Net segmentation model.