Good skid resistance of a pavement surface is essential for road safety. Loss of skid resistance can lead to property damage and loss of lives. Ever increasing need of driver safety poses challenges to the highway authorities to evaluate pavement conditions even more precisely under different conditions. Environmental variables like temperature, water, snow etc. can have a significant effect on the skid resistance apart from the vehicle and pavement related factors. The temperature increase in the tire-pavement contact region results in a complex relationship between the temperature and the friction and constitutes one of the main sources of uncertainty in interpreting the data of continuous field measurements. Likewise, very low friction coefficients can be observed between the tire and pavement surface under wet conditions. Nevertheless, the phenomena have not been adequately quantified yet within the skid resistance evaluation engineering community. The road agencies use correlation factors to estimate frictional characteristics of the road. These correlation factors are based on the experience and field test measurements which have a very limited scope in terms of reliability and transferability. It is the aim of this research is to study the effect of temperature and water on the frictional performance of the asphalt surface, when a pneumatic tire is traversing at given operating conditions. The tire operating temperature is a very important concern to the tire manufacturers, highway agencies and users due to its major influence on the traction performance of a tire. Tire rubber hysteresis is considered to play a major role in countering skidding of a vehicle travelling at high speed. Past studies showed that the contribution from the hysteresis component in comparison to adhesion has a larger influence on the friction measurements. This research aims to develop a sequentially coupled thermo-mechanical model in the finite element (FE) framework to determine the progressive temperature development in a pneumatic tire rolling over a simulated asphalt pavement surface mesh and its eventual effect on the hysteretic friction. This research also studies the hysteretic frictional behavior of a test tire under different surrounding temperature conditions. In this methodology, first, the tire is tested under static loading conditions to obtain its overall deformation characteristics and in particular the relation tire load - inflation pressure – foot print. In the second step, rubber material tests are performed to determine the rheological characteristics of the tire tread rubber. The test results are used for the determination of rheological parameters of a tire rubber material in the form of Prony’s coefficients. The Prony’s coefficients are later utilized in the development of a 3D FE test tire. In the third step, the tire is modelled in the FE framework, accounting for the different components of a tire like tread, side wall, carcass, belts, plies, inner liner, rim etc. The FE simulation results corresponding to the footprint and the deformation are compared with the measurements of static load deflection tests. The FE mesh of a given asphalt pavement surface is developed based on scanned asphalt surface data obtained by a Laser Profilometer and an X-ray tomographer. A dynamic analysis of a tire rolling at a definite slip ratio over a simulated asphalt pavement surface is performed. The results obtained from this analysis are used in the subsequent energy dissipation analysis to determine the heat fluxes. These heat fluxes are the input of a heat transfer analysis to determine the temperature development in the body of a tire. Many past experimental studies showed that the tire-pavement friction values are related to the tire surrounding conditions such as pavement temperature, ambient temperature, contained air temperature and surface characteristic of pavement. Therefore, in this research, the effect of pavement temperature, ambient temperature and contained air temperature on friction measurements is studied. By using the developed FE model, practical test conditions of fully and partially skidding tires traversing over different asphalt pavement surfaces, namely, Porous Asphalt, Ultra-Thin Surface and Stone Mastic Asphalt and AC-10 are analysed. Emphasis is placed on the determination of tire tread temperature as a critical combination of pavement temperature and ambient temperature. An attempt has also been made to determine the time required for different regions of a rolling tire to reach an effective temperature equilibrated state. Such kind of analysis gives insight into the effect of thermal behaviour of different components of tire on the tire hysteresis which eventually decides its frictional performance. This research also deals with the cornering frictional behaviour of a pneumatic tire. By utilizing the developed FE model, the cornering friction was computed for inflation pressure, wheel load, vehicle speed, side-slip angle, surface texture and mix design. Good pavement macrotexture has a direct influence on the vehicle safety during wet weather conditions by improving its traction/braking ability. Apart from the macrotexture, there are several factors that affect the wet friction, such as, environmental, tire and pavement related characteristics. In recent years, development of powerful finite element tools made it possible to simulate complex wet tire-pavement interaction as close as possible to the actual field conditions. However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, none of the past analytical/numerical studies were able to include the asphalt pavement surface texture in their analysis. In the next part of this thesis, the loss of friction under wet/flooded pavement conditions is studied. This research presents an FE approach to study the effect of surface morphology of asphalt pavements on the wet friction coefficient. The wet friction performance of different asphalt surface morphologies of open-graded mix to close-graded mix are studied by using the developed FE model. The tire-wet asphalt surface interaction FE model is duly calibrated with the field investigations conducted by using the state-of-art field equipment. The extreme loss of wet friction which ultimately leads to risk of hydroplaning is also studied. The FE simulations are performed on different water film thicknesses, tread pattern and different tire slip ratios and yaw angles. The results from the current study can be used as safety indicators of in-service asphalt pavements under wet/flooded conditions.