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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Best Practices > Publications > Publication Titles

Title:

A Discussion of Geospatial Character of Roadway Vegetation Roughness

Abstract:

Wind can transport snow from previous snow events onto the roadway, reducing visibility and accumulating in significant amounts to result in reduced traction and ice build-up on the roadway. The spatial pattern of roadway snow accumulation at a given site depends on the orientation of the roadway with respect to the prevailing winds during the event, the amount of snow mass present, and vegetative surface roughness factors along the roadway. Identifying the surface roughness and/or vertical extent of the vegetation is a geospatial problem that can be accomplished with ground-based observations. Blowing snow models are currently being developed at the University of North Dakota that would benefit greatly if detailed information on surface roughness and/or obstructions could be incorporated into the model. This paper illustrates the work that has been done to improve the geospatial variability of roadway vegetation roughness (defined as the roughness associated with vegetation cover within a distance that affects the roadway conditions) used within a blowing snow model.

Source(s):

86th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual meeting, University of North Dakota

http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/104887.pdf

Date: 2006

Author:

Grabow, Kroeber

Keywords:


Pavement condition

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