Weather Applications and Services in Field Operational Tests

The European Union (EU) places high emphasis and lots of efforts to tackle transport related issues like traffic jams, energy consumption, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and, most importantly, how to reduce the number of 40 000 casualties on European roads, annually. There are numerous intelligent transportation system (ITS) approaches and projects contributing to solutions to make transport safer and more efficient and sustainable. The European Union has funded various projects in this area in the past and initiated in 2011 so-called Field Operational Test (FOT) projects, the FOTsis (Field Operational Test on safe, intelligent and sustainable road operation; www.fotsis.com) being one of them. FOTsis is a large-scale field testing of the road infrastructure management systems, where new weather-driven applications and services will have a central role in the eventual service palette. The weather applications are being developed by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the only meteorological partner in the FOTsis consortium.