Expanded and Enhanced Road State Climatological Analyses from the Global Weather Corp. Road Weather Forecasts

Global Weather Corp (GWC) produces high spatial and temporal resolution road weather forecasts (referred to by the product name RoadWX), across North America, Europe, and Asia. The RoadWX forecasts combine GWC’s industry leading atmospheric forecasts with our road physics models to compute road surface temperature and road state, which represent critical information for road maintenance, vehicle safety, and navigation applications.

Previously, GWC has shown basic and limited climatological data from a RoadWX forecast archive. GWC has expanded the RoadWX forecast archive to include more than a full year of data for multiple road classes and bridges in the United States and to include data for primary roads in Europe. With expanded data, both temporally and geographically, more extensive climatological analyses which demonstrate the relationship between road state and atmospheric conditions can be performed. Example analyses include comparisons of the occurrence of road characteristics for different classes of roads (different pavement types, treatment level, etc.), quantification of different road conditions for bridges, initial European climatological analyses, and assessments of the variability of road condition over small geographic areas which have varied terrain. These are all in addition to expanding the time period of the previous climatological analyses which included estimates of how often roads are: a) dry, wet, slushy, or ice/snow covered; b) contain significant amounts of water or snow/ice; or c) are in a state where the predominant precipitation type does not match the road state (i.e., snow falling onto a comparatively warm road and melting, or snow falling onto a road that would induce melting when chemically treated). Primary goals of this study are to continue to understand and quantify the typical occurrence of different road characteristics for various road classes and to better quantify the impact of road conditions looking toward future technologies such as connected and autonomous vehicles.