NCAR/ SIP The Societal Impacts Program

If you chose D, in your car, you were right. In fact, it’s not even close. Approximately 7,400 lives are lost on the nation’s roadways under adverse weather conditions each year. Compare this to the 167 weather-related aviation fatalities, and the 573 weather-related fatalities that occur elsewhere every year[1], and you can see that we’ve got a real problem on our hands. truck in ditch during snowstorm

The problem isn’t just the 7,400 people who die each year in weather-related vehicle crashes. It’s also that this statistic is some sort of best-kept secret. Why isn’t it common knowledge that almost one-quarter of all roadway crashes—including fatalities, injuries, and property damage averaging more than 1.5 million per year from 1995 to 2005[2]—occur during adverse weather and could be at least partially prevented with more targeted, coordinated research efforts?

But while this fact may not be in the front of everyone’s mind, there must be some implicit awareness. How else can we explain the deluge of weather and traffic information that occurs every time you tune in to the news on your television set or car radio? And those of you on the leading edge of technology can now become even more overwhelmed with weather and traffic information via your cell phone, navigation device or satellite radio. So upon further exploration, we find that the problem isn’t a lack of information. Instead, it’s the result of either too much information being presented in the wrong way, or a glaring lack of the “right” information.

What do I mean by the “right” information? Road users and transportation system managers don’t need a weather forecast; they need transportation information, but not just any transportation information. They need dynamic, integrated information about the current and future state of the highway system.

Again, that’s not a weather forecast, fancy radar loop or the current temperature at the nearest airport or school. It’s not even dynamic routing on your in-vehicle navigation system—arguably such bits of information treat each vehicle as a discreet object and miss the fact that improving mobility and safety requires a system view that accounts for interactions between vehicles. It’s road-related content from a system wide perspective based on very-high-resolution forecasts both above and at the road surface.

You can’t get that when you separate the weather forecast from the traffic report. Instead, you get two pieces of critical information, and you have to function as your own geographic information system (GIS) to overlay that weather forecast onto your mental road map to figure out if and how this will affect you and what you should do about it. When you put the pieces together and see that the weather IS likely to affect you, you have to make some decisions: Do I drive 30, 40, or 50 mph through this fog? Do I take that route along the river or stay on higher ground? Or, if you’re a transportation manager, you’ll ponder, how much salt should I spread on the roads to keep the ice from bonding to the pavement, and when should I do it?

These are not easy decisions to make, and they are made all the more difficult when the information flowing into this mental GIS is inaccurate, incomplete or nonexistent. It’s easy to imagine thinking, “The river route is shorter, but it might become flooded, in which case the higher route would be better. But all I know right now is that it’s raining. I don’t know if the road is going to be flooded by the time I get down there.” Compound this uncertainty with the need to make some of these decisions while you’re driving at highway speeds, and it’s no surprise that bad decisions are made.

As dire as this article may sound, there is plenty of good work taking place today. The weather community continues to make advancements in numerical weather prediction, and the transportation community continues to advance intelligent transportation systems. However, while these are critical pieces to the puzzle, we will never get to where we need to be if each community does its work independently. Fitting these puzzle pieces together requires a significant amount of interdisciplinary cooperation. Likewise, extensive cooperation is necessary if we are going to develop the other pieces to the puzzle that don’t yet exist (e.g., achieving better observations of weather and road conditions, determining the best messages that produce the desired responses from end users, and defining appropriate weather-responsive traffic management strategies).

Fortunately, there is a subset of the weather and transportation communities that is working very hard to bring these two worlds together. We’re collaborating to explore the links between weather and roadways. We’re working to understand how traffic flows under varying weather conditions and to develop high-resolution forecasts at the pavement surface. We’re striving to integrate weather and transportation information into computer-based decision support systems and explore the decision-making process of road users and managers. We’re doing all this necessary work with an ultimate goal of disseminating the right messages. It’s quite a challenge when two communities depend on each other, but speak very different languages. In addition, the two communities are often driven by different priorities, policies, and politics.

One key way to address the challenge is to take advantage of “a new breed of experts,” a phrase coined by William Hooke in his Weather and Society Watch editorial (Vol. 1, No. 2). We need translators and interpreters who can turn weather products into transportation information. We need information brokers who can articulate the needs of the road users. And we need meteorologists who can develop products that meet those needs. And the solutions must be cost-effective. Not only does that decision support system have to save lives and keep the transportation economy moving, but it must do so within a public agency’s budget and/or in a profit-making manner for the private sector.

It’s apparent that we have a significant problem on our nation’s roads. Recent advancements in the road weather world, however, show us that the problems are surmountable if we recognize that weather doesn’t stop when the forecast is disseminated. Instead, that’s when weather starts to really matter—when society takes that forecast and tries to figure out what to do about it. Such efforts require the expertise of many disparate groups – not just meteorologists and highway engineers, but also social scientists, human factors psychologists, and technologists, to name a few who can act as a bridge and develop these cost-effective solutions. Again we’re getting there, but it’s clear that we ALL have more to do to lower the number of highway deaths and injuries caused by weather.

*Paul (Paul.Pisano@dot.gov) is the team leader of the Road Weather Management Program within the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration Office of Operations (See http://www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather/index.asp). He also serves as the chair of the AMS Committee on Intelligent Transportation Systems/Surface Transportation and the english secretary of the World Road Association Winter Service Committee.

Footnotes

[1] Aviation fatalities represent a 4-year average and all others represent a 10-year average, from the NOAA Natural Hazard Statistics website: http://www.weather.gov/os/hazstats.shtml#

[2] FHWA Road Weather Management website: http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather/index.asp

Photo credit:

Approximately 7,400 roadway fatalities each year are weather related. - Photo courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration