Summary of the meeting on 11 December 2015 on adaptation of structural design to climate change - Support to the implementation, harmonization and further development of the Eurocodes

It is expected that the global warming will reduce the frequency of the snow events. On the other hand, the intensity of extreme snow events may increase, since the capacity of the atmosphere to hold moisture increases with temperature. This may lead to the increase of both snow density and occurrence of extreme snowfalls in regions where temperatures still may happen to be below freezing level during precipitation events. To assess the evolution of the snow load and its impact on design of new buildings and on reliability of existing ones, a comparison of future trends, in both intensity and frequency of future precipitation in cold areas with current versions of snow load maps for structural design should be performed. The European Snow Loads Research Project was carried out under contracts with the European Commission DG III – D3 in the period 1996-1999 with the aim to provide scientific basis for harmonized definition of models for determining the actions of snow applied to the structural parts of construction works. The project was led by Pisa University. The snow load design map produced by this project is incorporated in Annex C of EN 1991-1-3 with the aim to help National Competent Authorities to redraft their national snow maps and to establish harmonized procedures to produce such maps. A pilot study on creating a snow load map for structural design taking into account the climate change was launched at a working meeting on 8 April 2014 at JRC/Ispra with the participation of Pisa University and the JRC CRM and ELSA Units. While the study has been performed in Pisa University, the JRC CRM Unit provided data on climate change projections, and the two JRC Units consulted the approach and the results. The results obtained show that the developed procedure is very appropriate for the creation of snow maps taking into account the climate change implications, since it allows to estimate characteristic ground snow loads on the basis of daily data Tmax, Tmin and h rain, which are typically available as outputs of climate change projections for all possible scenarios.