Quantifying Hazard and Climate Change Fragility for the Airport Access Road in Salluit, Nunavik, Quebec

摘要

With changing climatic conditions and increasing infrastructure demands, infrastructure owners, operators, and planners must possess tools to objectively aid their decisions on climate change adaptation and infrastructure maintenance. Risk analysis tools, either qualitative or quantitative, would be very beneficial to select engineering designs and allocate funds for the expected maintenance of linear infrastructure on permafrost. To this end, the paper provides an example application of a newly developed Excel spreadsheet, called Arquluk-RISK, which quantitatively calculates hazard and risk based on site soil, permafrost, and climate condition variabilities. This example focuses on the hazard analysis of total and differential thaw settlement, active layer detachment slides, and culvert collapse and gradient failure for current climate conditions for the airport access road in Salluit, Nunavik (northern Quebec), Canada. The software and analysis includes the variation in hazard due to increasing mean annual air temperature in the coming decades.