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Title:

Development of Climate Zones for DARWin-ME

Accession Number:

01475803

Record Type:

Component

Availability:

Transportation Research Board Business Office

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Abstract:

The Enhanced Integrated Climatic Model (EICM) integrated in the DARWin-ME design procedure allows users to select adjacent weather stations to generate a virtual weather station (VWS), whose data are further used to predict environmental impact on pavement performance. The DARWin-ME approach doesn't fully consider the potential spatial variations among these adjacent stations. Therefore, developing climate zones within a state may be necessary to account for the different climatic patterns and improve the accuracy of generated climate data. In this paper, using climate data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), a cluster analysis technique is applied to develop climate zones for the State of Oklahoma. Consequently, climatic data from NCDC, DARWin-ME site-specific weather station, DARWin-ME interpolation approach using adjacent stations, and interpolation using stations within the same climate zone are obtained and compared. It is anticipated that the virtual weather data generated from the approach developed in this paper will provide more accurate data than those using the built-in DARWin-ME database and approach. However, due to the fact that Oklahoma is one of the most geographically flat states in the US and the spatial variations within the states are insignificant, only minor improvements are obtained using the proposed technique in the DARWin-ME analyses. It is identified in the paper that selecting 5 to 10-year period of climate history data provided in DARWin-ME to generate climate data for a 20 to 40-year pavement design is inadequate. It is recommended that further work needs to be conducted in the states where substantial spatial variations are present.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFD50 Rigid Pavement Design.

Monograph Accession #:

01470560

Report/Paper Numbers:

13-4149

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Li, Qiang
Wang, Kelvin C P
Zhang, Jun

Pagination:

23p

Publication Date:

2013

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2013-1-13 to 2013-1-17
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Identifier Terms:

DARWin-ME (Computer program)

Geographic Terms:

Oklahoma

Subject Areas:

Design; Environment; Highways; Pavements; I15: Environment; I22: Design of Pavements, Railways and Guideways

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-4149

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Feb 5 2013 12:48PM