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

Title:

Field Trial of Automatic Road Condition Detection

Abstract:

The purpose of the trial was to compare the road sureface condition measured by an automatic road weather station against independnt human observation at the same section of a highway. To conduct this test a road weather station and a new design of road surface sensor were installed on a two-lane highway in Utti in South-Eastern Finland for the winter period of 1998-1999. The new sensor was equipped with a special feature to directly measure water layer thickness and to reveal the presence of ice, snow, and frost. Measurement and observation seemed to agree in 86 percent of 292 human observations where the two sensors were treated as independent measurements. This figure increased to 92 percent, if the data from the two sensor were combined with a simple rule to determine the surface state.

Source(s):

10th Standing International Road WEather Conference (SIRWEC); Vaisala Oyj (Finland) and Finnish Naitonal Road Administration

Date: 2000

Author:

Haavisto, et al

Keywords:


Snow
Ice/Frost
Environmental Sensor Station (ESS)

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