Fang Yenn Teo

• Ph.D
• Professor (Full) at University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus

Floodwater flows through urban floodplains with storm water systems are often inadequate during extreme storm events and/ or when the river flood inundation extent becomes extreme. Such flows may cause potential hazard risks to humans and their properties along the floodplains. Recently, flood hazards relating to vehicles have become more noticeabl...

With the climate change caused by global warming, the occurrence probability of urban flooding due to flash floods has increased gradually. Flush floods propagate rapidly, which can lead to significant hazard to human life and property. Flood hazard to vehicles has become more noticeable and frequent in recent years. Therefore, it is important to i...

The hydrodynamic effects of estuarine mangrove trees on tsunami currents have been studied in this paper. An existing two-dimensional depth-integrated numerical model, with both the effects of drag force induced by mangrove trees and the blockage effects on the water flow through mangrove swamps, have been included. To investigate how these trees a...

Most urban rivers carry much natural debris, such as vehicles and trees, during extreme flood events, and these large debris, particularly vehicles, can block a local hydraulic structure such as a bridge. Such blockages usually increase the upstream water levels and cause more water to be diverted into adjacent urban areas. A scaled physical river...

In recent years, extreme rainfall and related disasters, including floods and landslides, have led to significant property damage and loss of life globally. Southeast Asia (SEA) is particularly impacted by these rainfall-driven events. This study reviews research development and approaches to understand the current status of monsoonal extreme rainf...

Water pollution remains a longstanding challenge globally, prompting substantial investment in water quality protection. The integration of advanced machine learning models offers promising avenues for accurate water quality prediction, enabling proactive measures to safeguard water sources. Presently, water quality assessment relies predominantly...

Flooding remains a persistent and ongoing challenge in Malaysia, posing continuous difficulties and hardships; therefore, combating flood risk has become a main priority for sustainable development in this country. The application of sophisticated engineering in hard structure approaches and flood control systems are often incongruous to the public...

Ammonium is a form of nitrogen that can be present in natural water systems due to various sources, including agricultural runoff, wastewater discharge, and decomposition of organic matter. High concentrations of ammonium in seawater can have several significant consequences for marine ecosystems such as harmful algal blooms, oxygen depletion, acid...

Natural hazard threats have grown as a result of climate change, fast demographic development, and major urbanization. Devastating floods have occurred in several areas of the world recently, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is located in a region with a dry environment. In arid or semi-arid regions, rapidly forming flash floods associa...

An episode of extreme monsoonal flood event has severely affected the East and West coast of Peninsular Malaysia from 16th to 18th December 2021. The extreme rainfall was documented to be associated to Tropical Depression 29 and Typhoon Rai. In addition, biomass burning aerosols were suspected to be capable of intensifying the precipitation. Thus,...

The agriculture sector, due to its significant dependence on climate patterns and water availability, is highly vulnerable to changing climate patterns. Pakistan is an agrarian economy with 30% of its land area under cultivation and 93% of its water resources being utilized for agricultural production. Therefore, the changing climate patterns may a...

Malaysia is a tropical country that experiences heavy rainfall throughout the year, and is therefore prone to flooding, thus, a sound flood forecasting or warning system is essential. The architecture of a water level forecasting model is important in a reliable flood warning system. In this study, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) modeling is used t...

Vehicles are one of the most common objects that are usually washed away by the water flow during flood events resulting in several damages and casualties. Regardless of the vehicle type and flow condition, vehicle orientations in relation to the incoming flow play a significant role on the vehicles stability limits. Therefore, studying the hydrody...

Water security and urban flooding have become major sustainability issues. This paper presents a novel method to introduce rates of change as the state-of-the-art approach in artificial intelligence model development for sustainability agenda. Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and deep learning long short-term memory (LSTM) models were considered for fl...

This study introduces a systematic methodology whereby different technologies were utilized to download, pre-process, and interactively compare the rainfall datasets from the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Mission (IMERG) satellite and rain gauges. To efficiently handle the large volume of data, we developed automate...

The scarcity of fresh water is one of the leading concerns for underprivileged remote communities due to their unaffordability to the conventional water supply. Bearing in mind the changing climatic conditions and annual increment in water demand, desalination has been stated as highly adequate since it utilizes natural sunlight and the simple conc...

Ammonium is a form of nitrogen that can be present in natural water systems due to various sources, including agricultural runoff, wastewater discharge, and decomposition of organic matter. High concentrations of ammonium in seawater can have several significant consequences for marine ecosystems such as harmful algal blooms, oxygen depletion, acid...

Significant biomass burning aerosols resulted from biomass burning activities from Sumatra and Kalimantan Island transported to Malaysia every year from August to October by the southeast monsoon. These transboundary haze changes the precipitation pattern by aerosol interaction with radiation and cloud which affects the solar radiation budget and c...

The extensive impacts of climate change on the ecology and the environment have made it one of the biggest challenges being faced by the humanity today. Apart from the temporal scale, the climate patterns also vary on the spatial scale due to the different spatial features and the latitudinal location. This necessitates investigating the changing c...

The Sarawak River Basin is one of the major river basins located in the southern part of Sarawak, Malaysia, and has experienced frequent extreme rainfall resulting in flash floods in recent years. This study aims to carry out trend and statistical analysis of annual maximum daily rainfall (AMDR) for 10 rainfall stations distributed evenly in the ba...

Algal bloom has been a persistent problem for both fresh and marine water, with no exception for a coastal reservoir (CR). Among the algal bloom mitigations for a CR, shape optimisation to reduce algal bloom occurrence has been frequently mentioned. However, there was no literature found on the actual shape optimisation study or process for CR. Thu...

Ocean remote-sensing satellite data have been widely applied in the areas of oceanography, meteorology, the environment, and many more fields in science and engineering. However, missing data due to cloud cover, equipment failure, etc., limit its application. Therefore, reconstruction of the missing data through an appropriate method is essential....

Elevating the accuracy of streamflow forecasting has always been a challenge. This paper proposes a three-step artificial intelligence model improvement for streamflow forecasting. Step 1 uses long short-term memory (LSTM), an improvement on the conventional artificial neural network (ANN). Step 2 performs multi-step ahead forecasting while establi...

Extended Abstract As population increases, sources of high-quality fresh drinking water decreases. Many communities have considered using desalination processes to provide fresh water when other sources and treatment procedures are uneconomical. Desalination can be characterized as any interaction that eliminates salts from water. There is very str...

Channel confluence and bifurcation flows are common phenomena in a natural river. Understanding the characteristics of these dividing flows can help engineers to make decisions on flood risk reductions. In this study, a numerical model has been applied for idealised Y-shaped channels in both cross-sections of rectangular and trapezoidal. InfoWorks...

Climate change have led to extreme weather events such as higher rainfall frequency that can cause severe flooding. In Malaysia, there is an increasing trend on extreme rainfall events and short temporal rainfall, particularly during the inter-monsoon season. In order to protect private properties and public premises from flooding, Mobile Flood Wal...

Understanding the changes in climate and land use/land cover (LULC) over time is important for developing policies for minimizing the socio-economic impacts of riverine floods. The present study evaluates the influence of hydro-climatic factors and anthropogenic practices related to LULC on floods in the Kelani River Basin (KRB) in Sri Lanka. The g...

To address water-related issues of river pollution, floods, droughts, and ecological water allocations, there is a need for an integrated river basin management (IRBM) plan for the successful management of all the river basins in the country. Stakeholder engagement is one of the important elements for the effective implementation of IRBM. In this s...

Predicting crop yield is an important issue for farmers. Food security is important for decision-makers. The agriculture industry can more accurately supply human demand for food if the crop yield is predicted accurately. Tomato is one of the most important crops so that 160 million tonnes of tomatoes are produced annually around the world. In this...

Urban expansion is a major threat to diversity, especially in rapidly developing tropical countries where urban areas are growing at great pace and protection is limited. We conducted a systematic review of published research on the ecology of lentic habitats in tropical urban areas. The review focused on understanding: (1) how much is currently kn...

The tsunami is one of the deadliest natural disasters, responsible for more than 260,000 deaths and billions in economic losses over the last two decades. The footage of the devastating power of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami perhaps remains vivid in the memory of most survivors, and Malaysia was one of the countries affected by the unprecedented 20...

Modern designs of solar still desalination technology are reported to tackle the cost and energy issues. However, the low productivity of this technology is the main challenge that inhibits its commercialization uses. In this study, a triangular solar still (TrSS) integrated with an external PVC pipe solar heater and an internal separated condenser...

Fecal coliform removal using stormwater biofilters is an important aspect of stormwater management. A model that can provide an accurate prediction of fecal coliform removal is essential. Therefore, feedforward backpropagation neural network (FBNN) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) models were developed using a range of input featur...

Watercourses and roadways commonly intersect in their layout at many locations through bridges, drainages, and fords. During heavy rain events, watercourses may overflow causing serious disturbance toward traffic movement. Under such circumstances, attempting to drive through these intersections can be extremely dangerous. Therefore, understanding...

Current common practices for concrete production by the construction industry in Malaysia are the use of raw materials and the disposing of construction and demolition waste to landfill. These practices have caused significant environmental impacts (EIs) that could lead to serious environmental health issues. To counter these impacts, the use of su...

Streamflow forecasting is the most well studied hydrological science but still portray numerous unknown knowledge. The conventional physical-based model is unable to yield a high accuracy of forecast due to the embedded noises, non-linear and stochastic nature of hydrological data. This paper is to review the recent development of the artificial in...

Conventional urban drainage structures that store water over time are habitat for the mosquito larvae. Appropriate stormwater management practices can help in preventing the breeding of the mosquito larvae. Thus, a study was conducted to evaluate the performance of a proposed bioretention system in controlling dengue at the campus university in Sem...

Seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) system is popular in most islands and coastal areas around the world with limited fresh water resources. A SWRO system was designed to fulfil 50% of the population water demand in Cape Town, South Africa, which can lead up to 383,353 m3/day in the next 15 years. The total dissolved solid (TDS) within the product (i.e...

Bioretention system is one of the best management practices for rainwater runoff redirecting and storing before discharge into existing stormwater system. On the other hand, road divider is designed for dividing the traffic flow for road safety. However, it may be a blockage for surface runoff on road and possibly created ponding during heavy rainf...

During extreme flood events, various debris like floating vehicles can block the bridges in urban rivers and floodplains. Blockage of vehicles can influence the floodwater hydrodynamics and potentially on the flood risk implications. Such obstructions often raise upstream water levels with back water effects, causing more water to be redirected int...

Non-point source (NPS) pollution has become a vital contaminant source affecting the water environment because of its wide distribution, hydrodynamic complexity, and difficulty in prevention and control. In this study, the identification and evaluation of NPS pollution risk based on landscape pattern were carried out in the Hanjiang River basin abo...

The current study aims at the development of an incipient motion equation and a self-cleansing design chart based on the critical shear stress approach for a rectangular channel. Data from previous experimental work on incipient motion for rectangular flumes were subjected to multiple linear regression analysis. Selected regression models were furt...

Ponds and lakes may be common in urban landscapes and frequently have high biodiversity and conservation value. The importance of landscape-scale conservation of lentic habitat networks has recently been recognised, yet little research has been conducted at this scale. Approaches to inventorying lentic habitats at the landscape-scale are needed to...

Spatial interpolation is important for visualizing changes of parameters over space. Interpolation methods for the spatiotemporal analysis of rainfall pattern changes of Peninsular Malaysia due to climate change were evaluated. Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and Ordinary Kriging (OK), Geographical Weighted Regression (GWR) and Multi-scale Geograp...

Study region Sarawak, Malaysia. Study focus This paper presents a framework (‘HyFFlow’) designed to provide a systematic characterisation of river flow regimes. HyFFlow consists of four packages, together yielding information on rainfall and flow patterns. They include analyses to identify and characterise different types of high flow event, based...

The Urban Eco-Sustainable Index for Upscaling Water Security at Catchment Level in Langat River, Malaysia has developed by using the Modified Watershed Sustainability Index or MicroWSI (MWSI), which was based on the Participation, Design and Management Components. The study has successfully applied spatial and social dimensions on ecohydrology of t...

This study explores the concept of hydraulic flushing gate with an automated control system as a flow control structure of the urban storm water system. The research team has implemented a flush gate with the automated control system to the flow of the water in a drainage channel. The flow control structure was used to determine the effectiveness o...

Big data have rapidly developed as a viable solution to many problems faced in engineering industries. Specifically, in the industry of water resource engineering, where there is a tremendous amount of data, various big data techniques could be applied to achieve innovative and efficient solutions for the industry. This study reviewed the proposal...

A major programme of dam building is underway in many of the world's tropical countries. This raises the question of whether existing research is sufficient to fully understand the impacts of dams on tropical river systems. This paper provides a systematic review of what is known about the impacts of dams on river flows, sediment dynamics and geomo...

Ponds and lakes are common freshwater habitats in urban landscapes, and often have a high biodiversity and conservation value. The importance of landscape-scale conservation of pond networks has recently been recognised, yet the categorisation and classification of pond network spatial structures is missing. Developing spatial methods and tools to...

Global concerns have been observed due to the outbreak and lockdown causal-based COVID-19, and hence, a global pandemic was announced by the World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2020. The Movement Control Order (MCO) in Malaysia acts to moderate the spread of COVID-19 through the enacted measures. Furthermore, massive industrial, agricultural...

Malaysia is a water rich country. Improving water resource management by adopting the new and innovative approach of down stream/ coastal reservoir can potentially increase the utilization of raw water resources. For Malaysia to meet water demans, increasing the utilization of surface runoff from the present 3.7% to 5% will be suffient. This potent...

The downstream low-lying regions of the Kelani River, including some areas in the Districts of Colombo and Gampaha, Sri Lanka, frequently face severe inundations due to extreme rainfalls in the upper basin. In the present study, 1-D and 2-D hydrodynamic models in HEC-RAS have been used to examine the flood inundations in the tidal influenced Kelani...

In terms of stability, the response of static cars in floodwaters has been widely investigated. However, the hydrodynamics of a non-static vehicle exposed to such events are less explored. Herein the study ponders the assessment of the hydrodynamic forces experienced by a non-static vehicle attempting to cross a low-lying flooded street. With that...

Communities are being menaced by floods since ages. Flood occurrence not only imposes loss to the infrastructure and property but it also claims thousands of lives and leave millions homeless. Floods occur due to hydro-metrological and natural factors, however in recent years, human intervention has added new dimensions to it. South Asia's geograph...

The infiltration process during irrigation is an essential variable for better water management and hence there is a need to develop an accurate model to estimate the amount infiltration water during irrigation. However, the fact that the infiltration process is a highly non-linear procedure and hence required special modeling approach to accuratel...

Suspended sediment load (SSL) estimation is a required exercise in water resource management. This article proposes the use of hybrid artificial neural network (ANN) models, for the prediction of SSL, based on previous SSL values. Different input scenarios of daily SSL were used to evaluate the capacity of the ANN-ant lion optimization (ALO), ANN-b...

Following the publication of the article it has come to the authors' attention that the first panel of Fig. 11 has been repeated with the second panel of Fig. 11.

The present study attempted to predict groundwater levels (GWL) obtained from precipitation and temperature data based on various temporal delays. The radial basis function (RBF) neural network–whale algorithm (WA) model, the multilayer perception (MLP–WA) model, and genetic programming (GP) were used to predict GWL. The objectives were: (1) to pre...

Sustainable stormwater management is one of the techniques used for managing water runoff as a measure to minimize the consequences of peak discharges, extension of flooding, and deterioration of surface water due to land use changes. The best management practices (BMPs) of sustainable stormwater management endorsed a more effective and environment...

Malaysia’s oleochemical processing industry uses crude palm oil as the main source of process feedstocks. Physical–chemical treatment methods such as coagulation and flocculation processes are widely used to pre-treat oleochemical effluent followed by biological treatment to meet Standard A/B as required by the Department of Environment (DOE). Esta...

The topic on sustainability of Industrialised Building System (IBS) in the construction industry of Malaysia is always debatable and questionable. This study is carried out to determine the carbon footprint of a typical commercial project with the application of IBS. In this paper, IBS is classified to aluminium formwork system and fully precast co...

Light Rail Transit (LRT) is one of the sustainable transports which is highly promoted by Malaysian government with the intention to ease traffic congestion. However, it is observed that a few of LRT stations in Klang Valley are underutilised and have lesser amount of user. Location of the stations should not be a reason for this as they are usuall...

Water Quality Index (WQI) is the most common determinant of the quality of the stream-flow. According to the Department of Environment (DOE, Malaysia), WQI is chiefly affected by six factors, which are, chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), dissolved oxygen (DO), suspended solids (SS), -potential for hydrogen (pH), and ammo...

A paradigm shift from the traditional strategy of upstream freshwater reservoirs to downstream coastal storages has been widely debated for the implementation in Malaysia. The government in the current financial allocation has listed a few of water resources projects to emphasis on the downstream reservoir approaches, including the projects on off-...

Conservative peak flood discharge estimation methods such as the rational method do not take into account the soil infiltration of the precipitation, thus leading to inaccurate estimations of peak discharges during storm events. The accuracy of estimated peak flood discharge is crucial in designing a drainage system that has the capacity to channel...

It is well documented that the Earth's climate change is inevitable and the world is increasingly facing a crisis of water resource availability. This is a matter of utmost importance as water resources management is essential for human socio-economic, ecological sustainability, and forms the basis of all life on Earth. Water scarcity affects more...

The contributions of the microbial loop to the ecosystem in the Bohai Bay, China was studied in this paper. An eco-hydrodynamic model coupled with pelagic and benthic systems was developed, and the comparison between the numerical results and the field survey data shows that the model is able to reproduce the growth curves for ecological variables...

Big data has emerged recently as a viable solution to the many problems faced by all engineering disciplines. Big data is defined as extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions. Specifically, in water resources engineering, where...

Malaysia has experienced rapid transformation of forested catchments to urbanized ones since mid-1980s. The present study depicts the impact of land use changes on flooding potential of an urbanized tropical catchment located in Sungai Dua Besar, Klang Valley, Malaysia. For this, the available land use maps from years 1966, 1984, 2002, and 2010 wer...

Recently, issue regarding water scarcity has raise a lot of alarming signals all around the globe and the Country likes Malaysia comes as no exception. However, the Country is blessed with a tropical climate which comes with rainfall all year long. Rainwater harvesting system (RWHS) can be the answer to provide solution to the water shortage issue...

An evaluation on the applicability of bio-retention system in grassed road divider under high rainfall of equatorial region was conducted by developing computer-aided stormwater models using USEPA SWMM 5.1. The models simulated road runoffs with and without bio-retention systems. A single unit of bio-retention system tested here was 3 m in width, 6...

Natural water cycle in the urban areas has been affected by physical development. The oldest part of the Kuching city, particularly along the Kuching Waterfront suffers the most hit from the impacts of urbanization. In order to increase the water sensitivity of the site, a proposed solution is to have site storages which act as a structural element...

In recent years, urbanisation and land development have led to an increase in river sand mining activities. These activities have given rise to various problems including: river bank erosion, river bed degradation, river buffer zone encroachment and deterioration of river water quality. Excessive removal of sand may significantly distort the natura...

This paper presents the development of a fully coupled surface water and groundwater flow model. The governing equations of the model are derived based on a control volume approach, with the velocity profiles of the two types of flows being both taken into consideration. The surface water and groundwater flows are both modelled based on the unified...

Siltation, or sediment pollution, is a cause for water pollution by fine particles, which are categorized as clay and silt. With the increasing concentration and accumulation of suspended sediments (<63 µm) siltation occurs, which is most often caused by soil erosion or sediment spill. The high rate of suspended particles causes the ecological degr...

Information on pollution level and the influence of a hydrologic regime on stormwater pollutant loading in tropical urban areas remains scarce. More local data is still required, as rainfall and runoff generation processes in tropical environment differ greatly from temperate regions. This study compares the stormwater runoff quality from urban cat...

Siltation, a phenomenon resulted from the presence of fine particles in an aqueous environment, dominated by silt and clay, is a known and common environmental issue worldwide. The accumulation of fine sediments engenders murky water with low oxygen levels, which leads to the death of aquatic life. Thus, investigating the physical and mechanical pr...

Global warming and climate change have been captured more public concern in the recent years. In Malaysia, studies found that extreme water events such as floods and droughts have shown significant changes on intensity and frequency of their occurrences. Therefore, this study has been undertaken to assess the performance of a dry detention pond in...

Hydraulic numerical models are now widely used as a prediction tool in decision making because they are convenient and practical for projects that involved wide area, thus more cost-saving compared to physical models. Numerical modeling normally applies complicated mathematical equations, which have coefficients that are site specific. Therefore, m...