WeatherShare was developed by Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University, and sponsored by California Department of Transportation to improve weather related situation assessment, incident recognition, and response by providing streamlined access to surface weather data from multiple sources.
The Phase II system covers all of California with emphasis on its’ more than 16600 miles of state and federal highways and provides the most recent and forecasted weather information. The information is collected from over 3200 surface weather stations from state and National weather sources such as Caltrans Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS), California Data Exchange Center (CDEC), MesoWest, NOAA’s Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) and the NOAA National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD). Three-level Quality Control (QC) procedures have been implemented to flag questionable sensor readings. Other value-added features include mapping NDFD data to California highway mileposts, and using combinations of data to detect and display alert conditions.
The system was designed based on a multi-tiered architecture with an open source platform. All mapping information is displayed on a layered Google Maps display.
Principal Investigator
Douglas Galarus
Senior Research Associate
Program Manager: Systems Engineering, Development & Integration
Western Transportation Institute (WTI)
Montana State University - Bozeman
PO Box 174250 Bozeman, MT 59717-4250
Phone: (406) 994-5268
Email: dgalarus@coe.montana.edu
Technical Contact
Shaowei Wang, P.E.
Research Engineer
Western Transportation Institute (WTI)
Montana State University - Bozeman
PO Box 174250 Bozeman, MT 59717-4250
Phone: (406) 994-5923
Email: swang@coe.montana.edu
Caltrans Project Manager
Mandy Chu, P.E.
Senior Transportation Engineer
Office of Traffic Operations Research
Caltrans, Division of Research & Innovation
1227 "O" Street, MS-83
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: (916) 654-7656
Fax: (916) 654-9977
Email: mandy_chu@dot.ca.gov
Caltrans Project Champion
Ian Turnbull, P.E.
Chief
Office of ITS Engineering and Support
1657 Riverside Drive
Redding, CA 96001
Phone: (530) 225-3320
Email: ian_turnbull@dot.ca.gov