UNH receives $1.8 million grant to study road resilience and flooding

Source: UNH receives $1.8 million grant to study road resilience and flooding DURHAM — After a summer of high heat, steady sea level rise and devastating hurricanes like Hurricane Ida, which produced record amounts of rainfall causing destructive and deadly flooding in the Northeast and the Gulf Coast, coastal roads have continued to take a severe beating resulting in endless wear and tear. Because these roadways have become increasingly vulnerable, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has awarded a $1.8 million grant to researchers at the University of New Hampshire to study how and why coastal hazards like excessive flooding are causing roads to crack and crumble and find ways to protect them. “We’re trying to better understand the causal links of not only the extreme events but also the gradual changes in sea level rise that can increase the rate of damage to pavement and trigger failures that require major road reconstruction,” said Jo Sias, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “We’re looking at storm surges and wave action but also factors like the amount of time the pavement is under water.” The focus of the project is to understand the combined hazards of overtopping and subsurface moisture – flooding from above and below the road. UNH researchers – and their partners at the University of South Alabama and the Rockingham Planning Commission - will develop a number of hydrodynamic models that can analyze fluids in motion. They will use new data collected in the field as well as historical information to create high-resolution models to study groundwater and pavement as well as perform an adaptation impact assessment to develop a toolkit to help assess the vulnerability of roadways to flooding hazards. Researchers say that while engineers have investigated these impacts independently, an approach is needed that combines [...]