Smart Highways

With storms often playing havoc with the nation's highways, scientists are beginning to home in on "road weather"--the effect of weather changes on particular stretches of pavement. Motor vehicle accidents involving bad weather (largely ice and snow) claim the lives of more than 6,000 Americans and injure almost half a million more each year.

Currently there is no national standard for linking information about current and predicted weather to road conditions. Those conditions can change rapidly: pavement can freeze or thaw in minutes over small areas, snow or freezing rain can form black ice without warning, fog can thicken rapidly, flash floods can wash out roads and bridges.

Highway officials frequently have to make decisions by weighing complex and often conflicting reports about weather forecasts, road conditions, and traffic from a battery of computer monitors--a less-than-airtight technique informally known as "swivel chair integration."

To improve that process, scientists at NCAR and several other institutions are collaborating to develop a comprehensive national program for road weather research, development, and applications. A pioneering project began in 1999. Known as the Maintenance Decision Support System, it is designed to help agencies involved in road operations to better gauge where and when to treat roadways for ice and snow.

The system uses several computer models to project hour-by-hour weather and road conditions up to two days in advance, with an update every three hours. The system allows users who are not weather specialists to

• view predicted weather and road conditions for each plow route,
• monitor the potential for deteriorating road conditions,
• predict the impact of upcoming weather on specific road segments,
• assess treatment recommendations generated by the system, and
• devise a plan for anti-icing, deicing, plowing, or other road treatment.

In addition to keeping roads safer, the system is expected to help safeguard the environment by fine-tuning the amount of chemicals needed to treat roads. And it will assist state agencies to identify windows of good weather for highway repair and maintenance.

Other road-weather projects are in the design phase, including ones to provide detailed decision support to traffic, incident, and emergency management personnel. Projects to provide live weather and road conditions to travelers as part of in-vehicle information systems are also on the drawing board.

< previous | index | next >

Home | Organization | Research | News | Education | Tools | Libraries | Search | RSS Feeds | Top

UCAR | NCAR | UOP | ©2008, UCAR | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Contact Us | Visit Us | Sponsored by

This document can be found at
Subscribe to NCAR & UCAR RSS feeds at http://www.ucar.edu/news/rss