Description:

Adverse weather conditions have a major impact on the safety and operation of our nation's roads, from low volume rural roads and signalized arterials to interstate highways. Weather affects driver behavior, vehicle performance, pavement friction, and roadway infrastructure. Weather events and their impacts on roads can be viewed as predictable, non-recurring incidents that affect safety, mobility and productivity. Weather affects roadway safety through increased crash risk, as well as exposure to weather-related hazards. Weather impacts roadway mobility by increasing travel time delay, reducing traffic volumes and speeds, increasing speed variance (i.e., a measure of speed uniformity), and decreasing roadway capacity (i.e., maximum rate at which vehicles can travel). Weather events influence productivity by disrupting access to road networks and increasing road operating and maintenance costs.

This session will consist of discussions on road weather technologies, infrastructure, observations, and forecasting. We invite road weather professionals and other practitioners to share best practices and lessons learned from road weather-related management strategies including:  

• Road Weather Technologies: systems that include road weather components.
• Road Weather Infrastructure: deployed infrastructure that captures weather/road weather and infrastructure that utilizes road weather (i.e., signal systems).
• Road Weather Observations: weather/road weather observations that are captured from infrastructure and how they are used for operational and maintenance activities.
• Road Weather Forecasting: new innovations and best practices in road weather forecasting.