In a typical year, there are 1.5 million weather-related vehicle crashes in the U.S., leading to 673,000 injuries and nearly 7,400 fatalities. Adverse weather and the associated poor roadway conditions are also responsible for 554 million vehicle-hours of delay per year in the U.S., with associated economic costs reaching into the billions of dollars. A solution for mitigating the adverse impacts of weather on the transportation system is to provide improved road and atmospheric hazard products to road maintenance operators and the traveling public. With funding and support from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) IntelliDrive(SM) initiative and direction from the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Road Weather Management Program, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is conducting research to develop a Vehicle Data Translator (VDT) that incorporates vehicle-based measurements of the road and surrounding atmosphere with other, more traditional weather data sources, and creates road and atmospheric hazard products for a variety of users. This presentation will outline current progress on assessing the accuracy and bias of vehicle measurements, and discuss how mobile observations can be used in the warning process as a data source and how we can transmit warning information to drivers.

last edit: Sun Feb 28 14:56:13 2010 CST , by lmf