Improvement of Michigan climatic files in pavement ME design.

Details

• Creators:
  You, Zhanping ; Yang, Xu ; Hiller, Jacob ; Watkins, David ; Dong, Jianping
• Corporate Creators:
  Michigan Technological University
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Mechanistic-empirical pavement design
  • Rigid pavements
  • Flexible pavements
  • Weather and climate
  • Weather stations
  • Data collection
  • Data quality
  • Sensitivity analysis
• Publication/ Report Number:
  RC-1626
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  Michigan
• Corporate Publisher:
  Michigan. Dept. of Transportation
• Abstract:
  Climatic inputs have a great influence on Mechanistic-Empirical design results of flexible ; and rigid pavements. Currently the state of Michigan has 24 climatic files embedded in Pavement ME ; Design (PMED), but several limitations have been identified. First, five of the climatic files cannot be ; directly utilized because of an entire month of missing data. These missing data should be filled properly. ; Second, the 24 weather stations in Michigan are not uniformly distributed geographically, with some ; regions poorly represented. It is desirable to add new weather stations for these gap regions. Third, ; existing climatic files for Michigan have not been updated since 2006. A longer climatic data length can ; better represent the long-term climatic conditions, so it is recommended that the data length of existing ; climatic files be extended. This study aims to improve the climatic files in Michigan for PMED. To ; achieve this goal, quantity and quality checks of the existing 24 climatic files were conducted to find out ; the potential missing data and erroneous data. Procedures for filling the missing data and correcting the ; erroneous data were proposed as well. The sensitivity of PMED design performance to weather station ; variation in Michigan, the five individual climatic variables, and the depth to ground water table was ; investigated. Two traffic levels (heavy and medium) and two pavement types (flexible and rigid) were ; used for the sensitivity analysis. Typical traffic load spectra, pavement structures and materials in ; Michigan were incorporated as well. Additional weather data from the Automated Surface Observation ; Systems (ASOS) and Michigan Road Weather Information System (RWIS) were investigated as ; potential sources to add new weather stations in gap regions and to extend the existing climatic files. ; Quantity and quality checks on both data sources were conducted to evaluate the feasibility of application ; in PMED. It was found the ASOS data and the existing climatic data are from the same historical data ; records. Fifteen additional weather stations were added to fill the gap regions using the ASOS data. In ; addition, all the existing climatic files have been extended from Feb. 2006 to Dec. 2014. Finally, climatic ; zones based on pavement design results and multiple climatic variables for Michigan were preliminarily ; investigated. Fifteen climate zones were established for Michigan based on pavement surface ; temperatures and distress predictions.
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• Format:
  PDF
• Funding:
  2013-0067
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/29499/dot_29499_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 6.14 MB]
• Collection(s):
  US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:7b7e25f58d2e94b8d7ca4396377dc64f89f27bfba80b33d7d4c92d911f2e4afc