Abstract Winter road maintenance is an important application field of meteorology in western and northern Europe, North America, and many other parts of the world. In order to provide timely short-period high-accuracy forecasts of road surface temperature and state (dry, wet, frost, or ice), an automated road ice prediction model is developed for the purpose of nowcasting (up to 3 h ahead). The model was validated against observations from 41 road surface sensors in seven countries. As far as the authors are aware, this model is unique in that it is the only fully automated physical road ice prediction model that requires no external meteorological input data other than automatically collected sensor measurements of surface temperature, air temperature, dewpoint, and wind speed from the forecast site. The results show that (a) the projection of primary meteorological parameters by the model itself as input is acceptable for this purpose and (b) model performance becomes poorer as nowcast period gets longe...