Updates to Hourly Climate Data for Use in AASHTOWare Pavement Mechanistic–Empirical Design

Abstract

The AASHTOWare Pavement Mechanistic–Empirical Design software requires hourly temperature, wind speed, percentage sunshine, precipitation, and relative humidity to properly calculate pavement damage and distresses. Actual or measured values, which vary hourly throughout a day for a given site, are required to properly capture the damage caused by environmental loadings. Currently the mechanistic–empirical design hourly climatic data contain approximately 1,200 U.S. and 300 Canadian stations. The U.S. stations typically contain data from 1995 through 2005, and data from the Canadian stations vary in length from 10 to 50 years, with the exception of some weather stations. Some agencies expanded their historical weather data to include longer periods of time. This paper documents the process and data sources that were used to update the current set of climate stations with climate data dating back to 1979 using the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) database. The results of the comparison between new climate files and the existing older climate data files for use in pavement design are presented. Overall, the NARR-generated climate data showed a very good comparison. The paper details the background of the NARR and its limitations and compares the performance predictions made by using the old and new climate data. The results indicate there is no systematic bias between the two climate data sets.