Development of Surface Transportation Weather Decision Support Requirements

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has now focused development of the weather information portion of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) in its Office of Transportation Operations. This office, and its weather/winter mobility program is carrying out parts of the program outlined a year and a half ago in the white paper "Weather Information for Surface Transportation". The FHWA is participating with the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology (OFCM) in the Surface Transportation Joint Action Group (STJAG) to refine requirements for weather information to support surface transportation decisions. The FHWA has funded a research task to define requirements for the next generation of weather decision support systems, focusing initially on winter highway maintenance, and involving the stakeholder community of system users and developers. In addition to compiling needs for all users from a variety of sources, the key to this task is the definition of operational concepts, based on generating detailed scenarios from characteristics of real weather events and surface conditions connected by information systems to the management decisions for state-of-the-art treatment and pretreatment techniques on the highways.