Development of temperature zone map for mechanistic empirical (ME) pavement design

This study performed a sensitivity analysis to see the effects of different climates of New Mexico on pavement performance using the mechanistic empirical (ME) pavement design analysis. Results show that the predicted distresses vary significantly for different climate conditions. However, there were only 13 weather stations available in New Mexico for the ME design climate database. These limited number of stations might not cover the complete territorial diversities of this large state. Furthermore, the existing data were outdated, and limited in length by year. To this end, this study updated the existing 13 weather stations to 2015 using the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) database. In addition, 11 new stations within the state, and 13 weather stations from surrounding states were included in climate database. Later, a comparative study was performed to see the effects of the climate change on predicted distresses in New Mexico. Results show that the climate change for a 10 years period have insignificant effects on pavement distresses. Then, the effectiveness of interpolation method for generating virtual station was investigated. Results show that the interpolation method is not effective enough to reflect the actual climate conditions for many sites. To solve this problem, a temperature zone map was developed using the NCDC database. The objective of this map is to select appropriate weather stations during interpolation. It is found that the temperature zone map reduces the error significantly. Therefore, this study suggests developing a temperature zone map when the number of the weather station is limited.