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

民用基础设施系统是地方、州和联邦最大的投资之一，这些基础设施系统对美国的经济、环境和社会成果至关重要。工程师设计的某些类型的基础设施的使用寿命为30至50年或更长，许多系统的运行时间超过其计划寿命数十年，而没有进行重大升级。未来当地极端事件的固有不确定性影响了强有力的基础设施管理战略的设计，导致利益攸关方对高分辨率气候预测数据的需求与虚假精度的潜在设计后果之间的权衡。这项研究将通过跨学科合作填补这一知识空白，以创建转化科学，将工程界的数据需求与气候科学界产生的极端预测相协调。这项研究将a）描述21世纪世纪工程设计中降水和温度极端情况的变化和不确定性，B）分析交通基础设施的适应性工程设计和稳健策略，以及c）制定风险沟通建议，以增加基础设施设计师和管理人员对这些策略的采用。一种可复制的方法，用于生成和使用有关21世纪世纪降水和温度极值的信息，以进行稳健的基础设施设计。该方法认识到并考虑到相互依存的环境和技术条件的不确定性和复杂性。这项研究的预期成果将是基础设施设计和管理概念的方法进步以及21世纪世纪极端情况下的沟通，以使利益相关者能够最大限度地提高对极端事件的适应能力。这项研究的结果将广泛传播给学术界，从业者和利益相关者社区，并纳入教育活动，为下一代工程师做好准备。

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.