Greenhouse gas emissions have caused global temperatures to rise since the mid-20th century accompanied by sea-level rise (SLR). Temperature increases and SLR-induced groundwater rise have been shown to cause premature pavement failure in many roadway structures. Hybrid bottom-up/top-down (hybrid) adaptation approaches have shown promise by initially investigating an asset’s response to incremental environmental change and then identifying the timing of critical effects for budgetary planning. This improves practitioners’ understanding of the asset’s climate resiliency and informs adaptation-plan development to minimize both cost and risk. In this study, a hybrid approach to pavement adaptation with climate-change-induced temperature and groundwater rise is demonstrated at a case-study site in coastal New Hampshire. The hot-mix-asphalt (HMA) thickness that achieves a minimum of 85% reliability is calculated for 70 combinations of incremental temperature and groundwater rise. Increasing the base-layer thickness improves resiliency against rising temperatures, but rising groundwater diminishes this improvement demonstrating that both HMA and base-layer thickness increases are needed. Thirteen adaptation pathways are evaluated for pavement performance, life-cycle costs, and road-surface inundation over a 60-year pavement management period. A stepwise and flexible adaptation plan is developed that includes HMA overlays with prescribed thickness and application timing, base-layer rehabilitation options, and re-evaluation opportunities.
High tide flooding (HTF) already affects traffic in many US coastal areas, but the issue will worsen significantly in the future. While studies show that large storm surge events threaten to be ever more costly, less damaging, but more frequent HTF events remain understudied and potentially carry a comparable economic impact. This study advances our understanding of the risks and impacts of HTF on vulnerable traffic corridors using hourly tide gauge water levels, sea-level rise projections, and link-level spatial analysis. It is the first study to estimate HTF economic impacts for varying levels of intervention, including reasonably anticipated driver-initiated rerouting and ancillary protection of adjacent property.
Pavements are vulnerable to reduced life with climate-change-induced temperature rise. Greenhouse gas emissions have caused an increase in global temperatures since the mid-20th century and the warming is projected to accelerate. Many studies have characterized this risk with a top-down approach in which climate-change scenarios are chosen and applied to predict pavement-life reduction. This approach is useful in identifying possible pavement futures but may miss short-term or seasonal pavement-response trends that are essential for adaptation planning. A bottom-up approach focuses on a pavement’s response to incremental temperature change resulting in a more complete understanding of temperature-induced pavement damage. In this study, a hybrid bottom-up/top-down approach was used to quantify the impact of changing pavement seasons and temperatures on pavement life with incremental temperature rise from 0 to 5°C at a site in coastal New Hampshire. Changes in season length, seasonal average temperatures, and temperature-dependent resilient modulus were used in layered-elastic analysis to simulate the pavement’s response to temperature rise. Projected temperature rise from downscaled global climate models was then superimposed on the results to determine the timing of the effects. The winter pavement season is projected to end by mid-century, replaced by a lengthening fall season. Seasonal pavement damage, currently dominated by the late spring and summer seasons, is projected to be distributed more evenly throughout the year as temperatures rise. A 7% to 32% increase in the asphalt-layer thickness is recommended to protect the base and subgrade with rising temperatures from early century to late-mid-century.
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