The Future of Transportation and Weather Needs

About 90% of weather-related fatalities occur behind the wheel of the car. Better communication to and from the vehicles is one way to address this problem, and much has been done to provide more timely and accurate weather and road condition information to drivers. But the driving environment is poised to undergo significant changes over the next decade. The promise of new technologies, particularly in the form of wireless communications and self-driving vehicles, has the potential to completely change the driving environment. And by extension, it can change the ways in which we communicate with the vehicles about weather and road hazards. Such communication can be machine-to-human, when it comes to providing information to a driver to change behaviors, or it can be machine-to-machine so that driverless vehicles operate in the safest manner possible under adverse weather conditions. In both cases, the systems require the dissemination of tailored and targeted information about adverse weather conditions with respect to the road, and yet such information does not yet exist. This topic directly relates to the theme of the AMS 2018 Annual Meeting of "Transforming Communication in the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise". Bringing together automotive experts and information integrators working on the vehicle of the future with the meteorological community will provide an opportunity to explore the intersection of these areas. It could help identify how the latest advancements in each of these areas (e.g., extremely high resolution forecasting at the road surface) can be combined to tackle the communication challenges and to develop solutions to make the roads safer even under the worst weather conditions.