Investigating the Role of Climate on Airfield Pavement Deterioration and Distress Occurrence Using Data from PAVEAIR Online Database

Differences in climatic conditions, aircraft traffic, and maintenance practices drive airfield pavements to perform differently. Through the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) PAVEAIR online database and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) online public platform, historical pavement condition and climate data from nearly 200 airfields in the dry freeze (DF), dry no-freeze (DNF), wet freeze (WF), and wet no-freeze (WNF) climatic regions were collected to evaluate pavement performance and distress trends. This research details the methodologies employed in the PAVEAIR pavement inspection data retrieval and dataset organization, and further presents the results of a two-part analysis. First, rate of deterioration (ROD) of various pavement families were evaluated by fitting a linear regression to the pavement condition index (PCI). Then, historical distresses data were analyzed for various pavement families in the different climatic regions. Families were assigned with respect to climate, pavement structure (conventional asphalt or asphalt overlays), and branch type (apron, taxiway, and runway). The regression results showed that pavements in the WF region have the highest ROD, followed by the pavements in the DNF region. In terms of branch type, in three of four climatic regions, aprons have the fastest rate of deterioration, followed by taxiways and runways, respectively. The distress analytics revealed that cracking type of distresses were the most common in all the regions regardless of the pavement family. The results showed that climatic data alone were not adequate to characterize airfield pavement behavior due to the multivariate factors affecting pavement deterioration. An accurate pavement and distress prediction modeling effort should at least include additional information on the structure and traffic level.