Probabilistic Weather Forecasting for Winter Road Maintenance

Abstract

Road maintenance is one of the main problems Departments of Transportation face during winter time. Anti-icing, i.e. applying chemicals to the road to prevent ice formation, is often used to keep the roads free of ice. Given the preventive nature of anti-icing, accurate predictions of road ice are needed. Currently, anti-icing decisions are usually based on deterministic weather forecasts. However the costs of the two kinds of error are highly asymmetric because the cost of a road closure due to ice is much greater than that of taking anti-icing measures. As a result, probabilistic forecasts are needed to optimize decisionmaking.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 03, 2007
Accession Number
ADA465169

Entities

People

  • Adrian Raftery
  • Richard C. Steed
  • Tilmann Gneiting
  • Veronica J. Berrocal

Organizations

  • University of Washington

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Temperature
  • Atmospheric Sciences
  • Bayesian Networks
  • Computational Science
  • Environment
  • Gaussian Processes
  • Ice Formation
  • Information Science
  • Meteorology
  • Monte Carlo Method
  • Neural Networks
  • Probabilistic Models
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Surface Temperature
  • Weather Forecasting
  • Weather Stations

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis
  • Polar and Arctic Studies