Weather impacts nearly all highway maintenance activities. Consequently maintenance managers and operators need accurate and reliable weather information to manage their resources effectively and efficiently. These decision makers also need weather information presented in a user-friendly manner so that they are not forced to try to integrate information from many sources in order to make their decisions. Under contract to the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), researchers at the University of Washington (UW) developed a capability to gather data from the many networks of weather instrumentation around the State. They integrated these data into a user-friendly format and developed a Web site for data display. The original Web site, called rWeather, went on line in 1999 and is still available on the Internet for public viewing, as well as for use by maintenance personnel. The second generation of this product, developed because of revised WSDOT Web page display standards, became available on the Internet in late 2001 as the WSDOT Traffic and Weather page.

However, neither rWeather nor the Traffic and Weather Web sites provides key road-related forecast information needed by decision makers. In order to correct this problem, the UW researchers developed a new product for maintenance operations decision-making. The product, called the Automated Real-time ROad Weather system (ARROWS), takes numerical weather prediction output and presents the forecast information in a format for easy use and understanding by maintenance personnel. The UW provided access to the original version of ARROWS to key volunteers in WSDOT maintenance over the summer of 2003 during on-going development. The UW released the final development version of ARROWS for a formal evaluation in the fall of 2003. This presentation describes ARROWS’ high-resolution modeled output, the integration of other weather information sources, and the development of the presentation format. The presentation also provides initial evaluation results from the first winter’s operational use by WSDOT personnel.