The WeatherShare prototype was developed as a component of the Redding Incident Management Enhancement (RIME) program, which consists of technology initiatives designed to improve public safety in the Redding area. The goal of the WeatherShare project has been to streamline and integrate available road weather data in the Northern California area into a single source that is easily accessible by incident responders and potentially the traveling public.

Based upon Caltrans’ specifications, the Western Transportation Institute (WTI) at Montana State University – Bozeman utilized technology to provide Caltrans District 2 with a proof-of-concept surface transportation weather system (Phase 1) that allowed users to view a compilation of available road weather data from various sources in the region. While the Phase 1 proof-of-concept system covered seven counties in District 2 and 13 counties in the adjacent Caltrans districts, the Phase 2 prototype system expanded on this to include the full state of California with all 12 districts and 58 counties. The Phase II prototype system shows promise to provide maintenance and operations personnel with a complete picture of the current and recent weather as well as detailed forecast weather. Through a user-friendly, intuitive, map-based interface, the prototype system provides users with detailed weather information state-wide and at milepost resolution.

Caltrans uses the ScanWeb application to aggregate and present weather information from RWIS sites to maintenance and operations personnel. Other applications such as SCAN Sentry are used by individual districts to provide additional capabilities such as weather-based alerting. There is a desire to combine these functionalities into a single, open system. The purpose of this project is to further develop the capabilities of WeatherShare to include those of ScanWeb, SCAN Sentry, and other desirable but currently unavailable functionality into WeatherShare through further development of WeatherShare – Phase III.

This research effort is jointly funded by Caltrans and the University Transportation Center (UTC) program. This project represents the component funded by UTC.