Online platform to access and process NASA POWER climate data for use in pavement design

Abstract The performance of asphalt pavements is influenced by environmental conditions. Due to the smaller spatial coverage and the lack of data from ground-based meteorological stations in some locations, especially in underdeveloped countries, climate data from the NASA POWER reanalysis have great potential for use in pavement projects. However, their use requires designers to have some knowledge of climatology and/or data processing. Therefore, the objective of this article is to develop an online platform to access, process and download the climate data required for use in pavement design, in formats suitable for use in different models, considering the following hourly data: air temperature, dew point temperature, wind speed, shortwave solar radiation, percentage of sunshine, precipitation and relative humidity. To achieve the proposed objective, a platform was developed in the R programming language, hosted on shinyapps.io and using the nasapower package. The tool accesses the NASA POWER reanalysis data, processes it, makes the file available for download in Excel format, and can be used anywhere in the world. In addition, the platform summarizes the characteristics of climate data through violin plots, enabling critical analysis and a better understanding of the local climate by pavement designers. The developed tool is presented, and an example of its use is demonstrated and can be accessed at https://climapav.shinyapps.io/nasapowerdata/.