Abstract:
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Designing buildings to properly withstand the weight of snow on the roof of the structure is a serious consideration in many states. The American Society of Civil Engineers has long published national design snow load requirements, but these requirements relegate most mountainous states to “case study” regions. The process of defining snow load requirements touches upon many branches of statistics, including extreme value analysis and spatial interpolation and requires a fair amount of data wrangling. This paper describes recent collaborations between statisticians and structural engineers to create a data-driven set of national snow load requirements, greatly reducing the number of case study regions. These collaborations strike a balance between innovation and precedent, accuracy and conservatism, and automation and expert opinion, culminating in a set of reliable and reproducible snow load requirements for the nation.
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