Is It Safe To Drive?
Severe weather can create hazardous driving conditions. During inclement weather, how can drivers get
current information about Indiana roads? What are the road surface and sub-surface temperatures
throughout the state? How can I tell if road conditions are safe?
The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) maintains weather sensors and stations along the road
network throughout the state. The data from those sensors was available to a select group of winter road
operation planners to help manage road conditions. INDOT wanted to make this data available to local
officials and the general public.
INDOT developed the
Road Weather Information System (RWIS) and made it
available via a web portal. The site pulls data from the weather sensor servers every fifteen minutes.
Users can browse the maps and select sensors for detailed information, or view summary tables of all the
sensors. The user can also label the maps with the most recent information from the sensors. There are
currently 30 sensors online with new ones being added as they are installed.
This website is part of a larger effort to get decision-making data out to the general public, local and federal
decision makers. A main priority is to take existing web pages and applications that are text-based and add
meaningful mapping or GIS components to them.
Results
The RWIS portal is an efficient way to disseminate usable data, without requiring expertise in geography or
computer sciences. It has been very popular, especially during extreme weather events. During a single
large snow storm in December 2004, the site had tens of thousands of unique visitors with over one hundred
thousand page hits for the five days snow was on the ground. Drivers were able to make intelligent,
well-informed decisions about their travel plans.
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