Abstract:
In recent years climate change has become a threat to both the existing and upcoming pavement infrastructure. Most of the researchers agree that the climate change started affecting the existing pavement infrastructure all over the world. Therefore, there is a need for changing the design procedure by considering the climate change. This study focuses on the projection of climate using various models for Newfoundland climate regions, predominantly to investigate the impact of climate change on pavement design in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. AASHTOware Pavement Mechanistic-Empirical (ME) software was used to determine the pavement performance for both historical climate (named as baseline climate) and the projected climate change. In this study, all the historical climate data are obtained from the AASHTOware database. In addition, material, structural design and traffic details for the existing Trans-Canada Highway sections are graciously obtained from the Department of Transportation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. To predict climate change model, an existing climate change model was taken from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma) website. These models include daily maximum and minimum temperatures only. However, to predict the hourly climate model, two prediction procedures such as Modified Offset Morphing Method (M-IOMM) and Sine (14R-1) are utilized. Similarly, an hourly model was developed for the precipitation using M-IOMM method. These climate change models were incorporated into the AASHTOware ME Pavement software to predict the pavement performance. The change in pavement performance due to climate change was predicted and compared with the baseline pavement performance.
Contributors: Rana M, Swarna S T, Hossain K.