Climate Change Impacts to Arctic Fields

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:05]welcome um my name is Lan Picard and I am the chair for the project management department here at UAA College of Engineering and today I am your host for the professional development series and I'm delighted to bring our guest speaker today uh Captain James fry uh he is currently an instructor of civil engineering at the Air Force Institute of techn techology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and we are incredibly lucky he was uh just graduated from our master of science and project management program last December so it feels like it was just yesterday uh he also has a Bachelor of Science and civil engineering from Colorado State University and uh served SE total of seven years as an Air Force civil engineering officer he's had a wide range of um domestic and international experience in Alaska Korea around the country in the world and he is just an incredible student in his current role he teaches courses in civil engineering project management troop construction project management and cost estimating and his research interests Encompass infrastructure challenges in particular in cold regions and um has an incredible passion for Arctic studies and his uh Master's thesis last year and his research interest um culminated in his thesis which is about climate change impacts to Arctic airfields and so we're delighted today to have H Captain fry presenting his work and I want to also just make a huge shout out today as Veterans Day and just really celebrate this important holiday with our military family James his wife and all of our military members around the country and around the world so with that I will turn it over to James awesome thank you so much I really appreciate the uh the the warm welcome you stole all my thunder on on the intro so I don't have to go over that again so that's great so um I I will pop up this slide so I typically show this to all of my I can get it working there we go I typically show this slide to all my students as they're coming into class just so we kind of put a a face to a name so um Lan already kind of gave an overview of everything that's up there on the slide um couple pictures there on the bottom that's a some of my teammates that I've had the pleasure of working with over the years um you know some the the Air Force has provided some of the the best relationships I've had in my my whole life so certainly grateful and thankful for that um you know she highlighted my interest in art Arctic studies and uh I have just a huge interest in anything that's related to the state of Alaska so that picture over there on the right uh folks if you've never been to it that's the Army Corps of Engineers permafrost research tunnel in Fox Alaska so that's just north of Fairbanks and if you've never been I highly highly encourage you to go as you walk through you'll see uh B and bones and Mammoth tusks and things that are sticking out of the walls from 10,000 years ago uh you know grass that's still Green from thousands of years ago so very very interesting you can go see all the different characteristics in person you know see see Thermo cars and things like that so um just want to kind of bring some attention to that so without further Ado I'll uh go ahead and kind of jump into this presentation um we we'll kind of leave questions and discussion till the end uh but but how it's going to roll is I'll give you a little bit of the the background of my my research project how it came to be how we arrived where we're at today and then the the bulk of the presentation will be going over the research itself um and at the very end I want to want to tie it together and talk a little bit about the application of project management methodology to this because I think it's something that's uh unique uh to to the specific Endeavor that I've uh that I've done then like I said we'll wrap it up with with any questions that you may have so jumping in a little bit to to the project background so as Lan mentioned uh you know I attended UAA graduated last year I I believe I reached out to her around 2020 time frame uh I was really wanting to go to to UAA to to pursue a master's degree I wanted to do in project management um the Air Force was requiring me to complete a thesis option which was not something that was uh offered through UAA in that program so work ended up working with her in the department and uh they opened up a a pilot program for me to go ahead and uh complete a thesis in a an engineering topic while still accomplishing all of my project management curricula so uh that's essentially where we're arriving at with the the start of this project so um kind of opened up the door for that opportunity so I'll uh I'll kind of go over how uh I I arrived on the the particular research topic that I did so uh I just given my background as an Air Force engineer I I have a large interest in infrastructure as well as Arctic studies so really kind of started narrowing down my scope into something to do with permafrost something to do with climate change and something to do with uh infrastructure in Arctic regions so uh there's this thing called climate change that I think a lot of us are are acutely aware of it's something that's been a knowledge since the 1980s and uh the consensus today really is that air air temperatures are warming around the globe and particularly in Arctic regions they're they're warming about twice as fast as Global averages largely due to Arctic amplification loss of sea ice changes in albo so it's it's certainly Amplified in the in the polar regions so what exactly does this mean for Alaska um looking through my particular lens looking at infrastructure um you know we kind of started to look at it from that perspective so uh just throwing out some definitions uh permafrost if you don't know is just uh soil that essentially remains at or below 32 degrees fit for two or more years so it is it's essentially just that it's frozen ground um and if you look throughout Northern Hemisphere it occupies about 24% of the land mass in this hemisphere obviously a large portion of which is the state of Alaska so uh started looking at permafrost prevalence throughout the state if you look at the the the map on the lefthand side you'll see different zones of permafrost uh largely north of the Brooks range you'll see uh most of those soils are continuous permafrost the the interior of Alaska is largely discontinuous so it's in uh pockets and then uh moving into sporadic and really not a lot of permafrost around the Anchorage area um that's just kind of shown throughout the state how it changes um if you pan over to the map on the right uh this is essentially overlaying a lot of our major roads a lot of our major communities a lot of our major airfields throughout the state and uh overlaying that over that permafrost map and you'll find that about 40% of Alaska's airports are susceptible to changes in permafrost and what I mean by that are phenomena such as localized subsidence or long-term consolidation as permafrost degrades so uh this essentially kicked off my uh my thesis in general and from this information I was able to develop a main research question uh which is up here on the screen so to to what extent have changing climate and permafrost conditions impacted constructed airfields in Arctic and subarctic regions so uh specifically looking at those climate change impacts to Artic Air Fields as my title would uh suggest so how did go about doing this uh this is essentially my my research scope Baseline so uh partnered with the Alaska Department of Transportation worked with uh one of their pavement Engineers Mr Drew Pavey and uh he was very very helpful and inite insightful into narrowing down some locations to to really focus this study around and uh you'll see the locations up here on the screen uh we have airfields at the locations of burrow gnome katsu and clear and those are indicated on the map as well uh had a numerous selection criteria for for picking those locations um I really wanted airfields uh you know that we're comparing the same type of material uh from from location to location so all of these airfields have asphalt Pavements so we're comparing Apples to Apples as far as pavement Health uh I wanted locations with representative permafrost conditions so if you refer back to that map that I showed you previously of continuous discontinuous and sporadic zones uh each of those locations would be representative of those different zones of permafrost also looking at uh the the quality of pavement evaluation history so the Alaska dot is very very good at a uh upholding a every three-year rotational schedule as far as their payment evaluations are concerned uh so all these locations had uh pretty much an inspection done every three years for the past several decades so that's very comprehensive very good data set uh also was looking at geotechnical data so uh anytime there's construction project or some sort of uh geotechnical exploration bore holes was able to compile and consolidate all that data that the dot had provided for all these locations and it also similarly went back several decades and was kind of in alignment with the the payment evaluation so that provided um good means of comparison as well and then with all these locations being airports uh there's likely a you know weather station or some sort of weather monitoring uh device that was able to capture weather data or climate data through time um so that was a pretty easy grab as well and then the the last selection criteria that I had up here for this particular research uh just uh bringing some value back to the organization that I work for was having some sort of Department of Defense interest at all these locations so whether it be uh different radar sites or other Mission sets that supported the the Department of Defense they uh that was also included in the SE selection criteria so jumping into uh the climate analysis and and how that was conducted so there's a wide variety of uh climate parameters that you can look at when you're approaching a problem set like this uh the one that I really focused on was temperature so past research has confirmed there's a link between permafrost degradation and variations in air temperature and the consensus largely is that as air temperatures increase that's going to drive warmer permafrost and it'll eventually degrade so uh you'll see one of my first research questions up here how can each location's climate be characterized for for data analysis uh primarily did this through freeze and thaw index and this is just an example of um how some of the computations work so you uh grab a mean daily average temperature at one of these locations for a particular day uh and you would calculate the difference between that temperature and the freeze point so number of degrees below freeze point would indicate a uh a freeze index number of degrees above freeze point or above 32 degrees Fahrenheit that would indicate th index uh you sum those values over a calendar year and we able to to compare that over long time scales and the the result of that is found on this slide so you'll see for all four of these locations I have freeze andth index graphed um for for you know a couple for a couple decades and you'll see that uh there's a decreasing Trend in freeze index those are going to be the blue dots on these graphs at all of these locations as well as increases in thaw index so at Gom and clear you may notice that the thaw index is actually exceeding the freeze index in some years that's really uh very indicative of a warming climate and and certainly does illustrate the temperature phenomena that is occurring at all these study locations so uh that's kind of wrapping up like the first part of our our climate assessment for these sites and uh moving on uh kind of want to dive into physical characterization so some additional definitions I want to toss out there to you specifically related to permafrost would be ice Rich Tha unstable permafrost so we're talking about Frozen soil that contains a high enough ice content that it's going to become unstable when Tha so uh when you think of of I really want you to think of smaller diameter soils think of silts thinks of think of Clays um these soils are going to uh retain a lot more moisture and obviously when that moisture freezes it's going to expand and uh create a larger volume and then similarly when that uh that soil column thaws it uh that moisture uh will will melt and uh drain and that volume is going to change a great deal uh conversely looking at ice por Tha stable permafrost that's uh Frozen soil that has tiny amounts of ice and they're going to show a minor change in soil volume with OD so think of well- drained soils such as sand such as gravels um things of that nature that aren't really going to have a major volume impact when when they uh when they Tha out so this slide has a lot of information on it I'm G to might do my best to to kind of break it down for you so these are all nominal geotechnical profiles that I constructed from uh borle data to represent each Airfield so you'll notice that at Barrow katsugo and gnome those are the three there on the left they all show presence of permafr U soils in the column and they all have upper extent degrading over time so that's shown by the the black bars on the Le hand side of each of these soil profiles um there are variations in data uh that were encountered and that's largely due to the spread of bore hole locations with time so uh the dot wasn't necessarily going in and conducting bore holes in the same exact location uh every single time they were doing an exploration so uh for example uh permafrost data at gnome it was actually Consolidated from an area of board holes that were about 150 feet wide by 2,000 feet long and if you're uh familiar with any types of geotechnical Investigations you know that there's going to be some variation there that's largely What's um leading to some of the that variation in Upper extent measurements um if you pan over to clear you'll notice that uh that location that's located in interior Alaska didn't really show evidence of per fresh soils at all so I do want to take a second here just to to emphasize the the importance of why we were looking so closely at these soil profiles so uh as previously mentioned all of these airfields they're surfaced with asphalt uh and asphalt is much unlike Concrete in the fact that it's not a structural member it's not designed to carry the load or the aircraft or the vehicle or anything that's traveling on top of it uh rather it's really designed just to transfer and distribute loads to subsurface layers so uh that's really why it's so important to have proper embankment design and proper embankment Construction um because that's going to be all the more critical than the the pave surface itself as far as performance over a long time span uh you'll go in you can Mill an overlay or you can you know do a full depth repair on a on a on a on a Surface but your embankment is largely going to be there a lot longer than the the pave surface will be um metaphor that I really like to use is you know if you lay out carpet on a hardwood floor uh hardwood floor is still bearing your load or is the the carpet just making that a nice wearable surface to to travel along so um you'll also notice that at all of these locations the the upper layers they have uh diagonal hatching through them that's just indicating that those are fill material so that material was specifically brought in uh during the construction process and added compacted to the embankment and that's primarily what's going to be used to support traffic loading uh typically you're going to want gravels um you that's kind of what you're looking for they're well drained they're not going to hold water kind of going back to that thaw stable Perma Frost definition um and and it's typically what you're look wanting for the these construction projects um so you'll see gravels and orange on these soil profiles uh also note that three of these locations are in coastal regions that are not on the elas road system so uh naturally occurring material at these sites is typically not that nice well-graded gravel that you'd want to construct with so you can see that reflected at locations such as gnome and Barrow um Barrow for instance is the most location it's the farthest From Any Road you have to barge any of your material in uh gravel is simply not a a feasible option for the the do to put in there and sand is really the best we could get lo you know sourc locally um so as you get deeper in these soil profiles you'll notice that there is a transition to smaller and smaller diameter soils um and a greater amount of Organics so this is material that you're pretty much trying to avoid especially in a in a permafrost type environment uh looking at clearer though our uh our interior site it's located on the Nana River uh that's a lot of gravel there so you probably expect a better performance out of that Airfield than some of these others so the the key takeaway from this slide uh just looking at the Sandy silting organic subgrade layers at Baro KATU and gnome uh they all had uh varying levels of ice content and uh had varying levels of Frozen soil classification from VX to NB uh which if you're familiar with those it basically means that it's a thaw unstable and you can expect High consolidation rates as that per Frost degrades so uh moving on a closer look at uh the measured data from these bore hole logs at each of our study location we got these graphs so upper extent of permafrost for each bore Hole uh I graphed that against years Explorations were conducted and you can see there's a clear Trend at all three locations that the upper extent is deepening in the soil layers so that's indicative of degradation um upper extent was pretty much the best parameter that we could pick pick uh most of these B holes were drilled to about 20 to 30 ft in depth and that really wasn't getting down uh below the actual permafrost layer so there's still permafrost present at that so upper extent was the the best we could get as as far as parameters um gnome was the exception most of those B holes were getting below the permafrost table so we could get an upper extent a lower extent and actually calculate a thickness off of that as well um and in fact the most recent geotechnical investigations from 2019 at showed that permafrost had degraded entirely at most of the B hole locations on that Airfield with little to no Frozen soil currently present so I want to compare that that data with um some some other concurrent data that's been been going on across the Northern Hemisphere uh so if you're familiar with the circumpolar active layer monitoring program or the column program they have a variety of stations uh located throughout the northern United States and Canada um and several of them have a very close proximity to the selected airfields for this study so the the primary goal of calm is to observe the response of active layer in near surface permafrost uh to climate change over long time spans so active layer here is defined as the that P portion of soil that sits above permafrost that thaws and freezes seasonally um so comparing that with upper extent data uh and and thickness data you can see here at gnome that gnome's permafrost thickness are are decreasing and converging to Zero by 2019 and then looking at the the column data sites you'll see that uh that uh uh active layer is increasing as well so uh both very indicative of of degradation so just kind of validation of of both data sets so a main research goal here obviously was looking at pavement Health um and I was wanting to pair these climate trends with pavement inspection data and really assess if there was any correlations there so uh procedures for conducting pavement evaluations uh largely uses a a visual distress writing system that's called PCI or pavement condition index uh and this is a a numerical indicator and it just rates service condition so if you have a a pavement with a score of zero or a PCI of zero uh that's denoting that that pavement is completely fail you're not going to be able to use it whereas a PCI score of 100 uh that means that that's a brand new pavement it it uh you know you just had it come out the paver and you just compacted it and you're good to go so uh regularly monitored uh PCI ratings did exist through those evaluations the do had conducted um and this helps entities and Airfield owners uh really identify early on the need for major repairs and you kind of use that as a forecasting Tool uh for when you're going to when you're going to to to need to have some sort of construction project to go in there and fix that so um selected this as a key metric for This research just because it was standardized it was available and it's uh pretty pretty standardized Across the Nation um in fact back in the 1970s uh the Army Corps of Engineers uh developed a pavement management system called pav and uh that's adopted by most government agencies throughout the United States uh the Alaska do uses this for their uh uses this tools a you know as a primary tool for conducting pavment evaluations and payment management for their airfields and I was given access access to um that pavement management system which was very beneficial so jumping into a little bit of the the pavement analysis so there's a very helpful function in this software called family modeling and this tool pretty much enables you to uh generate a pavement degradation curve and that's based off of inspections that are conducted throughout the whole life uh the whole inspected lifetime of an Airfield and it's going to graph a calculated PCI for every inspected section uh against the age of the pavement sample and then paper will match a closest fitting polinomial curve to that data and that's what you're seeing up here on the screen so uh like I said this really helps infrastructure owners forecast when you're going to need some sort of major Rehabilitation so for example this this curve that I have up here on the screen this is from a combination of 10 asphalt airfields that are in the the lower 48 I actually pulled this from um data from the Air Force civil engineer Center so these are all from Air Force spaces that have asphalt runways uh in the lower 48 up in the top upper left you'll see uh you start at a score of 100 and then over the period of about 40 years you're degrading to a PCI of around 55 so that's essentially what this curve is representing so we're going to compare this with several other airfields including those in this study so uh this green curve that I have up here on the graph this is representing an Airfield in South Central Alaska and uh just being transparent with this form this is a joint based elor Richardson um just kind of comparing these two orange curves are representing airfields in imperior Alaska so clear uh Airfield is the one with the dots and then uh the the other orange curve that's actually Ison Air Force Base up in Fairbanks adding some more curves onto this plot you'll notice that these are Arctic airfields uh in zones of continuous permafrost so Barrow KATU and gnome which are all Fields within this study and what I really want to bring your attention to is this black line now so this is uh denoting a PCI score of 70 so the Alaska state legis legislature requests that the dot maintains their runways to a surface condition of 70 uh that's primarily for aircraft safety just so we can ensure uh you know safe safe Landings and takeoffs and uh passengers and cargo are getting where they need to go um so notice that Artic locations with permafrost are typically degrading to that PCI score of 70 within four to eight years while other locations on this plot are taking 12 to 18 years to degrade past minimum standards that's a that's a large variance there um I do want to bring up that there's going to be a host of factors that impact that rate of degradation um that includes traffic what kind of uh aircraft are landing their tire pressures their wheel patterns what sorts of Maintenance strategies uh that are used at these airfields how often those maintenance strategies are employed quality of your construction you know how much funding you're getting environmental climatic variations right there's a lot of things that play into this um but specifically for this study we're looking at uh how this data connects to permafrost degradation so I'm I'm going to dive a little bit more into how we conducted that analysis and comparison so showing you these these different graphs these were uh generated out of another tool in P called condition performance and analysis and uh these are essentially tabulated data sets for every Airfield uh that I generated to show PCI deduct values per year since initial construction uh so that's essentially establishing a degradation rate for each inspected section um and I plotted those degradation rates against permafrost upper extent at those locations for the same time period um so previously we talked that the upper extent of permafrost will deepen into the soil profile as de ation continues uh you'll notice that there's a general increase in PCI degradation rate with deepening upper extent of the Frozen soil for Barrow and gnome and there's a slight increase here for KATU so to make this a little bit more readable I'll show you this plot so if you consolidate all of that data onto a single graph uh this is what you get and you'll see that average PCI degradation rate for each data set those are going to be shown with those triangular points uh and then upper and lower bounds are shown by the bars at each end of those whisker plots so uh like I said it's important to note that there's going to be other factors that affect degradation rate pav age of pavement being one of them um but this regression model did produce an rored value of 0 4872 when we're comparing that degradation rate to Upper extent of permafrost um further investigation showed that uh a lot of these uh extremely high values up here on the the top end of the plots those were associated with pavement sections uh that historically had recurring problems with differential settlement um that were confirmed to be attributed to permafrost degradations that's likely what's driving up a lot of these averages over here on the right hand side now uh PCI isn't going to tell the whole story here um so PCI is derived from distress data and distresses are just external indicators of of pavement deterioration so when an inspector goes out they're looking at different types of distresses and aggregating those into uh into pav and that's what's going to calculate your PCI uh so these pavement deteriorations or distresses are caused by loading they're caused by environmental factors and they're caused by construction deficiencies and it may be a combination of any of the three so uh what I did here was I developed parametric unit costs um based off of the best practice for repairing each of these distresses was able to determine a lifetime treatment cost based off of how many distresses were located in each Airfield um so basically breaking down this graph uh let's take a look here at KATU for example you'll see this large section here in the middle that's orange uh with with 50 50% so what it's saying there is at KATU Airfield uh 50% of the lifetime treatment cost to repair that Airfield was coming from the distress of block cracking so that's that's all this data is saying um and we're going to clear this up here in a little bit make it a little bit more readable um and per into this study here in a second so what we ended up doing we classifying distresses broadly into three different categories um you will see every distress that is available in uh the the the P database that you can assign deduct values to located over here on the right and from past research uh we're able to associate several of these distresses as being permafrost Associated or cold regions related uh so depressions and longitudinal and transverse cracking we classified as permafrost Associated uh block cracking and raveling which I'll show you some examples here in a second uh we considered to be cold regions related and then everything else just lumped into the other category uh for This research we're not saying that every single recorded distress uh is in fact caused by perro degradation or extreme cold but we're assuming it for this study just based on past research so here's some examples of some of those distresses so you'll see up here on the left here's a depression on Runway 1028 at the uh The Gnome airport so when you go out and inspect an Airfield uh oftentimes it's hard to to pick these out especially if it hasn't rained recently but if uh if you have had a rain event um it's pretty easy to identify just anytime there's some ponding or something like that so you'll see that's an example of a depression um caused by some sidence at at a gnome and then over here on the right you'll see some longitudinal cracking that's on a rolled shoulder that is from permafrost uh it it oftentimes does occur on on the shoulders but it oftentimes can extend into uh the actual pavement section itself and in fact in in talking with a bunch of the engineers at the Alaska dot uh these longitudinal cracks are not just going through the pavement surface they're going deep into the embankment uh as well so these are ones that we're considering are permafrost associated some of the cold region related distresses that we identified were uh block cracking so you can see that there on the left um and block cracking is largely attributable to extreme temperature cycling so in a lot of these locations you're going from you know negative 6050 in the wintertime to you know up to 90 degrees in the summertime sometimes uh so that'd be an example of what uh you know temperature Cycles would result in uh on the right you'll see raveling and raveling especially in these locations largely going to be attributed to just damage from snow plow scraping the surface of these airfields time and time again and you kind of see some different severities there so with these defined we applied that to that previous cost model that I showed you and uh developed this plot um so after after applying that to this model you'll notice that uh the majority of distresses uh were climate driven at Baro KATU and gnome so on the other hand when you're looking at Clear just over a quarter of the distresses were cold region related uh so not you know want to recall that the quality of embankment material and the lack of Perros clear were probably attributing to this um but uh from this analysis it's evident that the presence of permafrost and extreme cold climate are impacting what types of distresses we saw and they are driving costly your maintenance and repair so for this particular model 91% at Barrow 81% % at kibu 49% at gnome are representing the percentages of Lifetime treatment costs that were permafrost Associated or cold region related um and these locations also correspond to the highest PCI degradation rates that we previously investigated so at Clear only about 28% of the distresses were considered in those categories that is the first cost model in this study I'm going to walk you through uh another one so uh while I use parametric costs and uh you know from from published cost manuals from for that that last one primarily RS means is what I used to to develop those cost estimates uh this final analysis was really using historical data from the Federal Aviation Administration so the FAA has something called Airfield Improvement program and it provides federal grants for major Rehabilitation reconstruction projects at uh public airports so the state of Alaska largely leverages this and takes a lot of federal help um to get a lot of these these major rehab projects done and funded um so all these project costs and all this data they they were reflected to and adjusted to reflect 2021 US Dollars um so just factoring in inflation there uh and this is only a single data point in the terms of like actual recorded cost so this does not include uh you know preventative maintenance this doesn't include state funded projects but as I said that the State largely leverages this for a lot of their major projects so this this is a a valuable data point to consider so uh the graphs that we have up here is for each location um showing the the major Airfield Improvement program funded projects at those locations their amount in dollars um and the year that they are awarded I also included area weighted PCI in green just as lat just for latitude so you'll notice on all of these plots whenever there's um a major project that occurs in the red you'll see there's a latent response in PCI in that green curve so um and that's basically validating the data sets saying that hey as we're spending money our uh our PCI he is increasing a few years down the road uh when we get an inspector in there saying like yep those repairs were actually valuable and it's bumping up our our PCI and our our pavement health and we're able to prove that quantitatively so taking all this data we're going to compile this once again on a single plot um and this is consolidating yearly grants for all airports um at all of our studio locations and developed a cumulative cost curve in Orange um for the past 37e period uh you'll notice that this data shows that Rehabilitation and reconstruction projects funded by a uh exhibit several increasing rates of change during a couple different periods at these study locations those are those relative spikes in funding uh they are indicated by The Black Arrow so we'll remember that here in a second as we move on um but specifically why did these uh rates increase over these time periods um it's going to take a bit more of a thorough investigation the AIP grant program and I'll just take a moment a minute or two just to explain some some further analysis just trying to explain why those funding spikes may have occurred so uh using employment data um I I chose three additional airports in the in the lower 48 uh just to kind of compare to our our Arctic airfields uh filtered all of the the airports in the US by uh service level and type of Hub and material and all and all of that and uh selected an additional three airports at yako Washington Fort Smith Arkansas and Cody Wyoming just for comparison uh and these these airports are located across a multitude of climates um and they're assumed to be representative of the great greater AIP sponsor population for this size and scale of Airfield so uh you'll see these are all cumulative cost curves for the AIP program uh the total amounts of Grants dispersed show that study airfields are in fact receiving more funding than similar airports in the continuous us uh so increased costs could largely be attributed to Greater maintenance Rehabilitation might be uh you know caused by Dynamic perit Frost conditions uh it might be other economic factors uh we we talk about the the remoteness of our study locations The increased travel requirements the shorter construction seasons uh you know limited uh availability of qualified contractors go up and do the work we have a lot of challenges related to executing these projects in in Alaska so can uh you know obviously are playing in here um I do want to point out that the cumulative costs over here are uh are uh correlated to Latitude so you'll notice that our more southerly sites are costing more so as you actually get further north um it's costing more and uh there's some postulation there that perhaps our discontinuous locations are at higher risk of uh permafrost degradation and impacts infrastructure than our more Northerly sites that haven't seen as much degradation um just wanted to throw that fact out there so um another thing I want to bring up is you know locality differences do exist obviously things in in elas costing is a lot more uh my work in the dod it's it's very prevalent as we do cost estimates um and manage projects so uh we we largely employ things such as area cost factors so just looking at some uh some some DOD Publications and if you look at Anchorage Alaska compared to the US Baseline the the area cost factor in 2021 was 1.9 so we're saying on average it costs 1.9 times more to do a project in Anchorage than it does for the US Baseline so once again kind of some contributions towards uh some of the the data that you see up here on this slide so rolling back to the D the previous cost model that we were looking at those relative spikes I uh also plotted up on here thaw index uh the average thaw index for all of our study locations and those are graphed in red points and those are clearly on a positive and warming Trend um I I want to point out on uh years that the Tha index deviate significantly from the mean we're identifying those as local maximums uh those are yellow points on the graph so uh these maximums they're representing the highest number of thawing Degree Days in a calendar year that have been experienced in recent history so years with greater thawing Degree Days um can accelerate perm Frost degradation you're you're deepening in that soil profile uh you're thawing more things out um and you'll notice that when we have those relative maximums um and years when the Tha index reaches a new high those are consistently followed by spikes in uh in grant funding so uh just note there's a correlation there uh there there still needs to be further root cause analysis and a lot more investigation to assign uh true causes uh to what would be causing these funding spikes but this this correlation here it can prove useful to Airfield owners uh when we're monitoring climate conditions and potentially F forecasting future budgetary requirements and uh future programming requirements for for some of these airfields so just to just bring it home with the the research here I just want to summarize some of some of the research conclusions so uh we're able to find that calculated aend disese at all these study locations they do indicate warming Trends over the past 20 to 30 years uh the freeze index was shown to be decreasing with time at all of our study sites the thaw index was shown to be clearly increasing at cat to gnome and clear concurrently permafrost upper extent decreased with time at Baro kibu and gnome um permafrost at The Gnome airport had degraded most entirely at all borole locations by 2019 uh and this was shown through the aggregation of B hole lock data that showed the extent of Frozen soil uh we used family uh family curve tools out of pav um and that enabled the generation of some degradation curves to show side-by-side comparison of airfields um and that showed that study Airfield Pavements were shown to degrade two to three times faster in continuous permafrost zones uh compared to discontinuous Regions and locations in the lower 48 um uh curves from Barrow and gnome those degraded to a critical PCI three to four years post construction respectively uh gnome reached critical PCI after nine years uh clear reached it after 20 so for for reference a Consolidated uh data from 10 airfields in lower 48 uh you know as a US Baseline average it took about 16 years to degrade to critical PCI uh just for comparison's sake um study airfields constructed on permafrost they did exhibit a preponderance of permafrost Associated and cold region related distresses so uh measurement of the most costly distresses gauged economic impact at the study Airfield um and the definitive cause of these recorded distresses is not confirmed but it's suggested based on research of permafrost degradation and extremely cold climates and then finally looking at our cost models U the the accumulative cost to rehabilitate or reconstruct study airfields from uh the Federal Aviation Administration Airfield Improvement program uh and and that grant program it has increased since 1983 uh the grant values were continually increasing with time uh even after adjusting for inflation and then when comparing that to climate data um and historical maximums in thaw index at all study locations those were followed by spikes in grant funding and as I stated before those potentially could be used as a forecasting model for uh infrastructure owners in this region so that's inut shell a quick summary of all the research um that if if you're really interested in it and you want to go read it uh feel free to go go take a look at um my my thesis that's out there I do want to bring this presentation home with just a little bit of the the application of project management that I used uh to to conduct This research so I think most graduate students probably aren't thinking through this lens I think most of them are just working with their advisers and they're going out and they're trying to trying to get their work done as soon as possible but um working with the mspm Department Luan in particular on uh on on how to successfully get as much value out of this as possible I actually uh created and employed a project management plan for this whole research project I made a schedule I tracked progress I you know uh established key performance indicators I was monitoring and controlling this project from uh you know from the from the very beginning I you know had a Communications management plan I was looking at stakeholders I had you know was establishing expectations there as managing change managing risk um doing all those different knowledge areas throughout this whole process and I I think it worked out very very well uh ended up delivering my thesis you know but on time if not ahead of schedule and and graduated on time and uh considering the time frame I had about 16 and a half months I I could certainly consider that a success and uh and very happy with the results of everything one of my colleagues um that's that's inbound to our Schoolhouse here he he called me the other day and he's like hey I uh I'm gonna have you know I'm still coming in January but I'm gonna have to finish my thesis next quarter because uh we just couldn't get it done in in 16 and a half months so um seen a lot of folks having issues with that so I think that's a that's a result of using proper project management and getting a lot of value out of that as well so with that that's been about 40 minutes of me talking I will open it up to any questions comments or any discussion that that anybody in the room or anybody online would uh like to bring well thank you so much um James it again it's just a really such a nice Serendipity that we have a Veterans Day and we have an active military student graduate presenter it's just a really nice convergence of all of those things so thank you so much for your wonderful presentation Andy I'm going to ask for your help for anyone in the room who may have questions and anyone that is on um remote that has questions can you help me with that please sure so yeah we don't have any questions online anyone in the room have a question go ahead I have one question when you were looking at the payment uh degradation now you mentioned drainage at one place but how much did you take drainage in consideration was that a a major problem in some of these areas permal Fross or subr not draining properly certainly yeah that's a really good question um I would say more subjectively than quantitatively so uh you know if if you pull up satellite imagery of of gnome and KATU for instance you know a lot of that's built up um out a very coastal regions there's a lot of ponds a lot of lakes um things of that effect that are that are close by that can certainly affect pavement degradation as well um as you add you know uh water on top of a soil profile that's going to change your uh thermal regulation and everything so that's that's certainly in effect but uh for this particular research had to keep a you know somewhat of a defined scope so we didn't really look at it numbers wise if that hopefully that answers your question yeah yeah that's ansers it what is the jet blast erosion um are you talking for specifically for uh distress yeah the asphal right so uh when when jets are taking off um that's a lot of thrust coming out of jet engines and that can actually cause um a damage to your your asphalt wearing surface so you can actually be burning off oils and ulses and things like that and exposing aggregate so that's a that's a commonly seen dist stress especially at the the ends of runways as you're you're getting that first uh uh push for takeoff getting a lot of Thrust out of your jets so you'll see that commonly at the the ends of runways all right did you go to visit each of these sites personally you've been to all these sites as wellstead of curiosity unfortunately I I didn't get the chance to um I I've been too clear just because it's off the the road system so I was able to drive up there on another trip and and see it um but just due to uh to to travel constraints and everything I wasn't able to to actually travel out to these sites I really hope to at some point it'll be really neat to to actually set foot on them one one day but yeah everything was just uh from my computer unfortunately thank you all right in this L between I just wanted to mention that the password for today's survey is impact all over case um and Lan go ahead yeah I was just going to say thank you for everyone who joined today really was a privilege to bring one of our student graduate leaders uh and um amazing industry professionals and Veteran again to or um active duty military personnel talking to us today about this important topic I think there's a lot of besides just the research itself I think there are a lot of really interesting lessons about how these kinds of impacts um can affect cost estimates and and um infrastructure viability in the state of Alaska and I know um he talked about this but I think there was a lot of very great partnership that went on in this project not just with the dod but also with the Department of Transportation I think a lot of interesting data was provided that was very compelling for them as well and made a difference in their own ability to estimate infrastructure um maintenance costs uh Beyond runways themselves so I think James's work is beyond the specific topic and can actually be very helpful to others so want to thank you James for being here today uh thank everybody for joining us um locally and remotely and with that Andy I'll turn it over to to well actually James I'll turn it over to you wrap up and then Andy to close us out perfect thank you yeah thank you Lan I just wanted to say thanks to everybody for braving the storm I'm down here in Ohio and uh 60 degrees and and no snow so thanks for coming out and uh baring two feet of snow I I miss it dearly up there so enjoy it thanks all right okay thank you very much okay be sure to join us for our next professional development seminar series I want to say that's in