With the world getting hotter, road crews should install pavement that is more heat-resistant. CCEE’s Dr. Shane Underwood leads research to understand and improve the behavior of asphalt concrete in changing climates. He was recently featured in a CNN story titled “Extreme weather events put spotlight on climate change’s toll on US infrastructure” that first appeared on July 23rd. The news story examines the effects of climate change on transportation systems including public transport, and highways. The feature was spurred in part by the incidents of pavement failure that occurred in Washington state during record-breaking temperatures in early July.
“CNN sent a news crew to our Transportation Materials Lab in Fitts Woolard Hall to interview me and acquire scenes of our asphalt research,” Underwood said. “We demonstrated some of our experiments regarding the resiliency of asphalt under various conditions.”
The CNN story can be found here.
Underwood and his research team have been studying potential effects of climate change on transportation materials and systems for more than five years and have written extensively about it in various venues. Read more at the links below.