Understanding the influence of climate elements on traffic: the wind impact approach

Due to intense highway congestion in Europe, increased percentage of highway accidents, as well as mortality rate, safety is an imperative in highway planning and design. Highway design safety standards have been researched extensively, but not enough attention has been paid to the surrounding environmental impacts, foremost climate elements. Therefore, this research attempts to understand the least researched climate element — the wind, and its impact on highway safety. The highway landscape falls under the category of the wind impacts that can cause significant problems for the drivers throughout the year. The values for wind direction, frequency, and intensity were taken from the CARPATCLIM database and Meteorological Annuals. The evaluation of homogenized and harmonized set of data on a daily basis for a 20-year period documented a variety of high-intensity wind impacts on the researched highway. By using the ArcGIS and the interpolation method, it has been clearly observed at which points the effect of intense winds was present the most. In order to understand the overall problem of the impacts of winds on the researched highway, the fieldwork was conducted in various weather conditions. The checklists photo-documented and qualitatively described the observed extreme wind events (alone or combined with one more climate element). All calculated and collected data were observed and the image of the current situation was provided, and the proposal for control of the impact of wind using an adequate vegetation assembly (windbreaks) and landscape design has been offered.