Development of the Road-Based Land Surface Model and Its Application in Road Weather Forecasting

With the development of transportation system, the impact of the disastrous weather on road safety is becoming a focus of attention. It’s an effective measure to provide refined numerical weather prediction to protect the property and life safety of road-related public. China started late on road weather service, and the current forecasting are most directly from numerical weather forecast results on grid points and statistical forecast results. In this study, we combined the state-of-art land surface model CoLM, road weather forecasting model ENTICE and METRo to develop a road-based land surface model. The new model synthesized the impact of topography, meteorological environment and physical characteristics of road surface material and could be used for operational application. The model consists modules of the energy balance at road surface, vertical heat conduction and water/ice accumulation on road surface. Its input dataset includes geographic parameters, regional numerical weather prediction and road weather information system stations. Being applied to our integrated weather forecast platform, the new model greatly improved the accuracy of road weather forecast and could provide prediction of disastrous weather information for transport agencies, which is conducive to the traffic departments to take measures in advance to avoid damages caused by meteorological disasters.