Verification of Global Weather Corp untuned road weather forecasts

Global Weather Corp (GWC) produces high spatial and temporal resolution road weather forecasts, RoadWx, across North America and Europe. The RoadWx forecasts combine GWCs industry leading atmospheric forecasts with our road physics models to compute road surface temperature, a critical step to accurate prediction of the road condition.

Verification of the GWC RoadWx forecast is a core step to maintaining and improving forecast quality. GWC RoadWx forecasts from locations of over 650 Road Weather Information System (RWIS) sites were created and archived for approximately a year. After quality control procedures to determine reliably reporting RWIS sites, the forecasts have been compared for road surface temperature. The RoadWx forecasts utilized in this study are completely untuned, meaning that none of the observations from the RWIS sites were utilized in the forecast creation. An analysis of the GWC forecast performance will be presented, with a specific investigation when road temperatures are close to freezing. The ultimate goal of this study is to determine strengths and weaknesses of the existing forecasts and to locate areas where additional research and development can lead to improvements, while also demonstrating the high quality of the existing RoadWx product.