The Arizona DOT Resilience Pilot Program – Framework Identification, Partnerships, Climate Data Downscaling, and Drone Capabilities

The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) manages 30,000 maintenance lane miles, 4,750 bridges, and one international border, all spread over 114,000 square miles. The agency and its assets need to function from sea level to 6,000 feet and withstand temperatures from below 0°F to over 120°F. ADOT’s mission to provide a safe, efficient, cost effective transportation system can be compromised from the effects of heat extremes, dust storms, wildfires, flooding, landslides, rockfall incidents, and slope failures. In order to cope with the ever-growing cost of these threats, ADOT set out to develop a pilot resilience program that could incorporate existing planning, design, construction, operations, and maintenance criteria, identify a strategic and systematic framework, take advantage of available technologies, tools, and partnerships, build upon their 2014 Preliminary Study of Climate Adaptation for the Statewide Transportation System in Arizona and the 2015 Extreme Weather Vulnerability Assessment Final Report, and contribute to the national conversation surrounding these topics. Since ADOT has had a long history considering the balance between predictable asset deterioration curves and the unknown, erratic, and abrupt incidents of flood, overtopping, system hotspots, hydraulic-related failure, and extreme weather impacts, these topics were identified to make up the core of the pilot program. The following paper discusses three framework components of ADOT’s Resilience Pilot Program - stormwater, extreme weather, and handling scientifically-informed climate data downscaling as it relates to transportation systems. Moreover, the paper represents the partnerships undertaken to further evidence-based decision making, the opportunities from next generation ground based LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and drone-based photogrammetry services, and data collection platforms that can advance magnitude of peak flow engineering efforts.