Do I Currently Have Snow or Ice on My Road Network?

Locating Road Weather Information Stations (RWIS) across a customer’s road network answers part of the question, but what about the roads where there are no weather stations or information. Thermal Mapping has been a solution that has been widely used by customers across the globe to help understand temperature variation across the road network; the next logical step is to help customers understand surface state information across the road network. 

Route based assessment will help answer this question for what the current road temperature and road state across the network are. Route based forecasting will provide forecast road temperature and road state across the network. 

In today’s data driven society there are many data sources available. Road weather stations, Thermal Map data, mobile observations, and automatic vehicle location (AVL with snowplow data) are just some of the data available, which can help customers understand what the road conditions are over the network. One of the challenges is how to fuse this data to create a solution that a customer can understand to provide a true network view of the current (real-time) road state. 

Our team of scientists and researchers have been developing a route based assessment product. We are using state of the art technology and algorithms to create a network view of road surface temperature and road surface state to help customers understand a more complete view across the network without having to worry about trying to understand multiple data sources. 

We are piloting our solution with two Federal road authorities for the winter 2018-2019; we will release the service for other customers in early 2019, which also includes an API for customers to integrate the service into other systems. Further developments will include additional information like atmospheric conditions, level of grip, water layers on the road surface etc.

Based on customer feedback, we are creating a modern easy to use User Interface to allow customers flexibility on how to visualize and understand the information. Allowing users to view information with other data to help understand the current (and future) conditions across the road network.

Recently we created a short video to help explain what we are doing:

If you are interested in learning more about our route based assessment product or any of the Vaisala Ground Transportation products then please get in touch with us.