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

Title:

Developing a Storm Severity Index

Abstract:

A primary goal in highway maintenance is to develop the various processes in winter maintenance in such a way that quality control measures can be applied. A difficulty with this approach is that winter maintenance addresses the impacts of winter weather on the transportation system, and that the weather is inherently uncontrollable. The result of this is that in order for a quality process to be applied to winter maintenance, the severity of individual storms must somehow be assessed. The purpose of this paper is to present one way in which the severity of a storm can be measured, specifically by an index. The first step in developing an index for individual storms is to develop a method of describing storms. The work herein is based on the descriptions developed by Nixon and Stowe which describes storms in terms of six factors, including pre- and post-storm conditions, surface temperature, wind speed, and precipitation type. Using a simplified variation of this matrix based descriptions of storms (which results in more than 250 individual storm descriptions) a score is generated for each storm type, based on the various factors and their severity. This ranking or scoring of storms was evaluated by Iowa Department of Transportation Winter maintenance garage supervisors.

Source(s):

84th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, University of Iowa

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0361198105191100114?journalCode=trra

Date: 2005

Author:

Nixon, Qiu

Keywords:


Winter storm

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