This presentation projects the climate change and studies the impact of climate change on hazardous weather-related road accidents in New Brunswick province of Canada.
Climate change modeling uses 30-years daily weather records for the seven climate zones of New Brunswick, National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) re-analysis dataset, large-scale simulation data from the third generation Coupled Global Climate Model (CGCM3) and third version of Hadley Centre Coupled Model (HadCM3). Large-scale simulation data from Canadian GCM under SRES-A2, and SRES-A1B scenarios along with large-scale simulation data from Hadley center CM under SRES-A2, and SRES-B2 during the 21st century are used to model the climate change.
The climate change modeling estimates the increasing rainy days for all climate zones; however, the number of snowy and freezing days may decrease or stay the same for most of the climate zones during three different future periods in 21st century (i.e. 2011-2040, 2041-2070, 2071-2100).
This study also estimates an Exposure to Weather-Accident Severity (EWAS) index using both single and multiple road accident data. The negative binomial regression and Poisson regression models are applied to estimate the relationship between the EWAS index and weather-related explanatory variables of road accidents.
Surface-weather condition, weather-driver’s gender, weather-driver’s age, weather-driver’s experience and weather-vehicle’s age have strong positive correlations with EWAS index. Surface-road alignment and surface-road characteristics have negative relationship with EWAS index. These relationships are similar at different census divisions of the New Brunswick.
Increasing number of hazardous weather days estimated by the climate change modeling, and positive relationships among EWAS index and weather-related explanatory variables of road accidents suggest more hazardous weather-related accidents in future.
