Free Webinar: Introduction of Climate Changes and Its Impacts on Bridge and Building Codes

Structures are designed to provide safe service and operation.  The safety of the designed structures is affected by the temporarily as well as spatially varying natural hazards such as wind, snow, and ice accretion. Dr. Xuebin Zhang will give an overview talk on past and future changes in Canadian climate focusing on aspects most relevant to infrastructure adaptation and resilience. Prof. Han-Ping Hong will discuss the historical trends of the characteristics of the extreme wind speed, ground snow load, and ice accretion thickness and their use for structural design code making. The potential impact of the effects of climate change on setting the design wind load, snow load, and ice load in future design codes for a tolerable failure probability will also be discussed.

Guest:

Xuebin Zhang: Dr. Xuebin Zhang is Senior Research Scientist with Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada. His main research interest is the understanding of how and why the climate, in particular its extreme weather and climate events, has changed over the past century and how it is likely to change in the future. He works closely with the users of climate information. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He serves as a co-lead of the World Climate Research Program’s Grand Challenge on Weather and Climate Extremes, Editor-in-Chief for journal Weather and Climate Extremes. He was a coordinating lead author for the IPCC 6th Assessment WGI Report for the chapter assessing changes in extremes and for the chapter on changes in temperature and precipitation of Canada’s Climate Change Report.

Han-Ping Hong: Dr. Hong is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Western Ontario.  Before joining the department in 1996, he worked for more than six years as a research scientist in the oil and gas industry, concentrating on the optimum maintenance strategies of oil and gas pipelines under corrosion.  Dr. Hong has expertise in the areas of application of probabilistic analysis, reliability and risk assessment, natural hazard modeling, and design code calibration.  He has contributed to the reliability-based and economically efficient structural design code development and infrastructure retrofit. He is actively participating in several committees for structural design codes and standards, including the National Building Code of Canada and the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code.  He authored/co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed journal papers.  He received several awards and prizes for his research contributions.