The Clarus regional demonstration

Imagine having a single Web portal where all public surface transportation weather observations are collected, quality checked and made available to the transportation community, the weather enterprise and even individual users. After several years of investing in system design, implementation and testing, the U.S. Department of Transportation's (USDOT) Clarus System is operating in an experimental mode and is being populated with Environmental Sensor Station (ESS) observations from State, municipal and provincial transportation agencies from across North America.

Clarus, which means “Clear” in Latin, is the USDOT's prototype surface transportation weather data management system. The Clarus System uses state of the art algorithms to quality check atmospheric and pavement observations from both fixed and mobile platforms. Data contributors can receive information on the health of their environmental sensor station (ESS) networks as well as the calibration of individual sensors. Data users can receive a full suite of observations, quality checking flags and metadata information either via use of a web-based portal or through a data subscription service.

As part of the developmental process of the Clarus System, the USDOT began a multi-phased regional demonstration in 2007. The first phase included having teams of State and Provincial Departments of Transportation provide conceptual use cases for new products and services which would use Clarus data to support and enhance transportation agency operations. The second phase involved recruiting public transportation agencies to join the Clarus community by providing their observations and metadata.

The third phase began during the fall of 2008. Using concepts which originated within the first regional demonstration phase, five different use cases were presented and demonstrations were awarded to weather enterprise contractors. The use cases were divided into two main categories: one to improve the state of the practice of weather forecasting for surface transportation; the other to foster the development of new or improved products, algorithms, decision support tools or other innovations that are enabled through the use of Clarus data and support transportation operations.

This paper provides an update on the progress of the demonstration use cases with a focus on the decision support tools being tested and evaluated.