Climate change effects on structural reliability in the Carpathian region

Rózsás, Árpád and Kovács, Nauzika and Vigh, László Gergely and Sýkora, Miroslav (2016) Climate change effects on structural reliability in the Carpathian region. IDŐJÁRÁS / QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE HUNGARIAN METEOROLOGICAL SERVICE, 120 (1). pp. 103-125. ISSN 0324-6329

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Abstract

Climate change affects not only the natural but also the built environment. The latter comprises large part of societal wealth, and it is a crucial component of developed economies. The focus of this paper is the quantitative assessment of the reliability of load bearing structures in changing climate. Despite its significance relatively few quantitative studies are available on this topic, and particularly the Carpathian region has been analyzed insufficiently. Therefore, the aim of this paper is (i) to present two quantitative studies on structures and climate change for the Carpathian region, and (ii) to give an overview about approaches in civil engineering in relation to climate sciences, thus to trigger and facilitate future cooperation. The first part of the study is about the carbonation-induced corrosion of reinforced concrete structures analyzed considering six climate change scenarios. The results show that the depassivation probability can double from beginning to the end of the 21st century. For structures executed in 2000 the effects will be subtle within the first half of the century whilst the considerable changes are expected in the other 50 years. The second part of the study is about ground snow load and its effect on structural failure probability. It focuses on probabilistic models and statistical uncertainties, and draws attention to the significance of uncertainties arising from the insufficient number of observations. These uncertainties are typically neglected in current civil engineering practice and they are especially important for climate change for which the historical observations are not representative of the future environment. Bayesian statistical approach is used to handle these uncertainties. The analyses show that statistical uncertainties can have several order of magnitude effect on failure probability, thus their neglect is not justified. Additionally, long-term trends in historical snow observations are analyzed using stationary and non-stationary generalized extreme value distributions. Statistically significant decreasing trends (p < 10%) are found for numerous locations, but they are practically significant only for a few in respect of structural reliability. The results of both studies indicate that climate change can have significant practical consequences on structures and should be considered by civil engineering profession. Revision of design standards and further research in cooperation with meteorologist seem to be needed to explore and reduce the impacts of climate change on load bearing structures in the Carpathian region.

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