Translating Regional Air-Temperature Exposure into Thermal States of Pavement Materials: A Probabilistic Screening Framework

Meteorological archives often preserve abundant air-temperature records. However, verified pavement distress records are often unavailable. This makes it difficult to translate archive-scale temperature data into material thermal states that can support engineering screening and interpretation. This study develops a temperature-only probabilistic framework that links a national daily air-temperature background with asphalt and concrete thermal states through site-specific calibration. Northeast China was selected as the case study region, where synchronous 5-min observations of air, concrete, and asphalt temperatures were available from 2024 to 2025. Nationwide daily records from 1951 to 2019 place the air-temperature exposure background of the case study region in a national context. The case study region does not emerge as a dominant national hot-tail regime. Instead, it is characterized by colder minima and larger daily air-temperature ranges than the pooled national background. Under the same air-temperature exposure, asphalt showed stronger amplification of thermal peaks and diurnal cycling than concrete. In the case study region, both materials show a consistently cold-dominant screening pattern, with fluctuation screening secondary and hot screening limited. This qualitative ordering is preserved across weighting, archive-window, and transfer model sensitivity analyses, although hot and fluctuation magnitudes are less stable than the cold side estimates. The framework should therefore be interpreted as a thermal screening tool calibrated at a single monitored site, rather than as a universally validated distress or failure model.