Improving road weather hazard products with vehicle probe data

One of the goals of RITA's IntelliDrive initiative is utilization by the public and private organizations that collect, process, and generate weather products of vehicle sensor data to improve weather and road condition hazard products. Some users may not be able to, or not want to, contend with the complexities associated with vehicle data, such as data quality, representativeness, and format. With funding and support from the U.S. Department of Transportation's RITA IntelliDrive initiative and direction from FHWA's Road Weather Management Program, the National Center for Atmospheric Research is conducting research to develop a vehicle data translator (VDT) to address these vehicle-based data challenges. This paper first describes the VDT quality check (QCh) concept and then examines QCh pass rates for temperature and pressure data collected from 11 specially equipped vehicles operating in the Detroit test bed in April 2009. Results show that temperature pass rates are higher than pressure pass rates. Additionally, pass rates are somewhat affected by vehicle type, vehicle speed, ambient temperature, and precipitation occurrence for both temperature and pressure.