Road Weather Management Program
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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Title:

A New Paradigm in Observing the Near Surface and Pavement: Clarus and Vehicle Infrastructure Integration

Abstract:

The nation's weather enterprise generally relies on a network of a couple thousand automated weather observing stations to sense and report on the state of the lower atmosphere. These stations are typically situated in pristine fields adjoining airport runways. And while these stations fulfill the requirements for airport ground operations, they do little to accurately report on pavement and near surface conditions on the nation's roads. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is doing something about this data coverage gap through two initiatives - Clarus and Vehicle Infrastructure Integration. First, the Clarus Initiative seeks to maximize the utility of road weather observations by running quality checks on the data and then disseminating the observations to the weather and transportation communities. The Clarus Initiative involves the creation of an advanced data management system which will be able to assimilate all Environmental Sensor Station (ESS) observations across North America and provide quality checked road weather observations for any user. The second initiative involves utilizing passenger vehicles as mobile weather probes. The Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) Initiative is based on having automobile manufacturers equip cars with onboard units and transceivers that are capable of collecting snapshots of dozens of onboard systems (e.g., windshield wiper state or outside air temperature) and transmitting these data to a national communications infrastructure. Successful deployment of such a national system could result in the generation of millions of new vehicle-based observations which could reveal new details about the state of the atmosphere at the driver's level and conditions on the pavement surface. This paper provides details on the progress of both the Clarus and VII Initiatives which have the potential to change the way that the nation observes and manages surface weather data.

Source(s):

4th National Surface Transportation Weather Symposium, FHWA Road Weather Management Program and Noblis. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2008

Author:

Pisano, Kennedy, Stern

Keywords:


Observing network
Mobile sensing

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