Abstract:
Over the past 50 years, climate change has threatened both existing and imminent pavement infrastructure. It is also fore-casted to become more aggressive in the future. Therefore, pavement design procedure needs to be adapted accordingly, accounting for the climate change factors. The current study explores the projected climate change in Newfoundland using various climate change models. In addition, this study aims to quantify the influence of climate change on pavement design in Newfoundland and Labrador Province, Canada. To achieve that, a robust mechanistic-empirical pavement design tool (AASHTOWare ME Pavement Design) was used. A statistically downscaled climate change models were extracted from the coordinated regional downscaling (CORDEX) Experiments to predict the future climate. Then the minimum and maximum daily temperatures for five different locations in Newfoundland were extracted using a python code. However, there is a challenge to convert these daily temperatures into hourly temperatures. Therefore, two relatively new hourly data estimation procedures, such as the modified imposed morphing method (M-IOMM) and Sine (14R-1) were used. These hourly estimated data were utilized to further predict the pavement performance for all the five locations in Newfoundland, Canada. This study concludes that climate change accelerates pavement deterioration compared to baseline climate
Authors: Swarna S T, Rana M, Hossain K.
Link(s) for the Paper: Journal Website | ResearchGate