Road Weather Management Program
photos of lightning, trucks plowing snow, an empty road before a storm, and an evacuation
Office of Operations 21st century operations using 21st century technologies

Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Best Practices > Publications > Publication Titles

Title:

Vehicles as Mobile Sensing Platforms for Meteorological Observations: A First Look

Abstract:

The FHWA worked with Mitretek Systems to explore the feasibility of using observations from vehicles as a new, rich dataset for the weather and surface transportation communities. During the winter of 2005-2006, a project was launched that included several specially-equipped vehicles that collected data during a variety of weather and road conditions. An analysis was performed that provided some initial estimates of temperature biases from vehicles versus in situ platforms. The analysis also explored whether other factors such as vehicle speed, traffic volume or different weather phenomena (such as sun angle, cloud cover, wind speed, or precipitation) had an effect on these readings. This paper will describe the methodology that was used for the data collection and provide summaries for many of these findings.

Source(s):

American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, Mitretek Systems and FHWA

http://www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather/resources/publications/fhwa/moblsensfrstlkams07.pdf

Date: 2006

Author:

Stern, et al

Keywords:


Air temperature
Speed
Precipitation

PDF files can be viewed with the Acrobat® Reader®.
Office of Operations