Improving Road Weather Products with Vehicle Probe Data

One goal of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) IntelliDriveSM initiative is to utilize vehicle data to improve weather and road condition products, and then to provide those products to transportation system decision-makers, including travelers. This article describes research and development that is being conducted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to design, develop, and test a Vehicle Data Translator (VDT) to provide road weather products for decision-makers. The VDT extracts, filters, and verifies mobile data, and then generates and disseminates quality-checked, statistically processed data to subscribers. The authors explain the individual processing components of the VDT, including the data parser, data filtering algorithms, data quality checking algorithms, and statistical processing and derived variables. The article includes two examples of road and atmospheric hazard VDT products, fog and precipitation. One illustration shows the prototype VDT screen display.