Collaborative Research: Characterizing 21st Century Extremes for Engineering and Evaluating Robust Infrastructure Designs

University Corporation For Atmospheric Res, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Civil infrastructure systems are among the largest local, state and Federal investments, and these infrastructure systems are critical to U.S. economic, environmental, and social outcomes. Engineers design some types of infrastructure to have useful lives of 30 to 50 years or more, and many systems are operated decades beyond their planned lives without major upgrades. The inherent uncertainty about local extreme events in the future affects the design of robust infrastructure management strategies, resulting in tradeoffs between the desire for high-resolution climate projection data by stakeholders and the potential design consequences from false precision. This research will fill this knowledge gap through a cross-disciplinary collaboration to create translational science reconciling the data needs of the engineering community to the projections of extremes generated by the climate science community. This research will a) characterize the change and uncertainty in precipitation and temperature extremes for 21st century engineering designs, b) analyze adaptive engineering designs and robust strategies for transportation infrastructure and c) develop risk communication recommendations to increase adoption of these strategies by infrastructure designers and managers. This research develops an integrated, replicable approach for generating and using information about 21st century precipitation and temperature extremes for robust infrastructure designs. The approach recognizes and accounts for uncertainty and complexity in interdependent environmental and technological conditions. The anticipated outputs of this research will be methods advances for infrastructure design and management concepts and communications under 21st century extremes to enable stakeholders to maximize lifetime performance for resilience to extreme events. Results of this research will be broadly disseminated to academic, practitioner, and stakeholder communities, as well as incorporated into educational activities to prepare the next generation of engineers.