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:

The Development of Accurate Automatic Road-Weather Forecasts

Abstract:

During the last two decades a system of road-weather stations has been established in Denmark. This network of stations has been necessary in order to monitor the road-weather conditions in Denmark. A manual now-casting system was established in the 1980s to provide guidance for the road-weather authorities on the road maintenance. Due to the rapidly increasing number of road stations, to nearly 300 stations during the 1990s, the work load on the forecaster grew excessively. It was therefore decided in 1992 to develop an automatic road weather forecasting system with the goal of predicting as accurately as possible the relevant meteorological parameters such as road surface temperature, precipitation and dew point temperature five hours ahead. It has been decided to construct a numerical forecast model which is physically based on the computation of the heat budget components at the road surface. The model requires input from an atmospheric numerical forecast model `DMI-HIRLAM' run operationally at DMI. The road conditions forecasting system, which has been operational in recent years, is briefly outlined in section 2 of this paper. The operational experience gathered from this prediction system over the years showed indeed a predictive skill by the system. However, the demands on high accuracy in the temperature and precipitation prediction has been difficult to achieve unless a new effort was undertaken to increase the accuracy. A new 3-year development project was established in 2000 in corporation with the road authorities, based on new potential possibilities to improve cloud cover and precipitation prediction which turn out to be critically important. Section 2 also provides a brief introduction to the model upgrades established during the first year of the new project. Section 3 provides a description of two forecast examples in Denmark where the special problems associated with clouds and accurate road surface temperature forecasts are illustrated. Finally, some concluding remarks are provided in section 4.

Source(s):

11th Standing International Road WEather Conference (SIRWEC); Danish Meteorological Institute

https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=644952

Date: NA

Author:

Sass, Petersen

Keywords:


Pavement temperature

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