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WESTERN TRANSPORTATION INSTITUTE

CALTRANS DISTRICT 2

CALTRANS DIVISION OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION

WeatherShare

OVERVIEW | LINK | HISTORY | CONTACTS | UPDATE | ARCHIVED UPDATES | DOCUMENTS | TUTORIAL

WeatherShare was developed by Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University, and sponsored by California Department of Transportation to improve weather related situation assessment, incident recognition, and response by providing streamlined access to surface weather data from multiple sources. The Phase II system covers all of California with emphasis on its’ more than 16600 miles of state and federal highways and provides the most recent and forecasted weather information. The information is collected from over 3200 surface weather stations from state and National weather sources such as Caltrans Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS), California Data Exchange Center (CDEC), MesoWest, NOAA’s Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) and the NOAA National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD). Three-level Quality Control (QC) procedures have been implemented to flag questionable sensor readings. Other value-added features include mapping NDFD data to California highway mileposts, and using combinations of data to detect and display alert conditions.

Click here to visit the WeatherShare.

Recent Updates:

Wednesday 1/12/2011 Bad Weather	Thursday 4/29/2010 Try out the animation	Tuesday 4/20/2010 Checking conditions

Check back soon for more WeatherShare updates.

UPDATE: Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

One Stop Shop (OSS) and WeatherShare are overlapping, but complementary websites. While WeatherShare is geared towards weather information only, One Stop Shop adds information such as camera images and sign messages. And, OSS provides coverage for Oregon, although weather information is only shown for California. It’s taken us a couple weeks to put this update together, but we wanted to show how these systems indicate severe weather and road conditions.

On December 21st and 22nd, there was a great deal of precipitation throughout California and Oregon. Here we’ve grabbed some screenshots to show magnitude of the storm, and the wealth of information available in WeatherShare and OSS. Click here to view an extended version of this update, including over 50 screenshots. (Note that this is a large file - 20 MB.)

The NWS Observed 24 Hour Precipitation layer in WeatherShare (and OSS) shows estimated precipitation throughout California. Information from sensors and some complex models from the PRISM Group at Oregon State University are used to make these estimates. In the following image from WeatherShare, you’ll see a large amount of precipitation throughout the state, including very heavy precipitation in the Los Angeles area:

We zoomed in on the Los Angeles area and found values of over 4 inches (and more) from the past 24 hours:

Not only are past and current weather information available in these systems, we also show forecasts using data from the National Weather Service’s National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD). Here is forecasted cumulative snow for a six hour period:

The forecasted amounts of snow were high in the mountains near Los Angeles. We zoom in for further detail and find the following location along Highway 2, which indicates over 11 inches of snow during this 6-hour period:

Now, let’s look at OSS. In the screenshot below from December 22nd, 2010, we’re looking at the DOT Field Elements layer and the CCTV, CMS and Chain Requirements sub-layers:

CMS were indicating chain and traction tire requirements in Oregon:

This CCTV image showed why:

And there were plenty of similar images across Oregon and California at this time:

Here’s US 20 at Tombstone in Oregon:

I-5 at Siskiyou Summit:

Snowman summit on SR-89 near Mt. Shasta:

Obrien near Mt. Shasta shows rain rather than snow:

Fredonyer Summit west of Susanville:

Here’s more rain along I-5 south of Redding:

SR-99 near Fresno:

We currently don’t have CCTV images from all of California in OSS, but we plan to add more soon. Here are some images from Caltrans. This one is from US 395 near Mammoth. There was very heavy snow here at the time:

As you can see, these were eventful days in terms of weather. Keep an eye on the conditions using OSS and WeatherShare.

Click here to view an extended version of this update, including over 50 screenshots. (Note that this is a large file - 20 MB.)

Check back soon for more WeatherShare updates.

Project Contacts:

Caltrans Project Manager: Sean Campbell Chief, ITS Special Project Branch Caltrans Division of Research and Innovation 1227 O Street, PO Box 942873 Sacramento, CA 94273-0001 916-654-8868 916-657-4580 (fax) sean_campbell "at" dot.ca.gov www.dot.ca.gov/newtech/	Caltrans Project Champion: Ian Turnbull Chief, Office of ITS Engineering and Support Caltrans District 2 1657 Riverside Drive Redding, CA 96001 (530) 225-3320 (530) 225-3299 (fax) ian_turnbull "at" dot.ca.gov www.dot.ca.gov/dist2/
WTI Principal Investigator: Douglas Galarus Program Manager Systems Engineering, Development & Integration Western Transportation Institute (WTI) Montana State University PO Box 174250 Bozeman, MT 59717-4250 (406) 994-5268 (406) 994-1697 (fax) dgalarus "at" coe.montana.edu www.westerntransportationinstitute.org	Caltrans Past Project Manager: Mandy Chu Senior Transportation Engineer Office of Traffic Operations Research Caltrans Division of Research and Innovation 1227 O Street, MS-83 Sacramento, CA 95814 916-654-7656 916-657-9977 (fax) mandy_chu "at" dot.ca.gov www.dot.ca.gov/newtech/

OVERVIEW | LINK | HISTORY | CONTACTS | UPDATE | ARCHIVED UPDATES | DOCUMENTS | TUTORIAL