Welcome and thank you for standing by. this time all participants will be in a listen-only mode mode. For the entire conference. I would like to turn the conference over to Jocelyn Bauer. Welcome and thank you for standing by. this time all participants will be in a listen-only mode mode. For the entire conference. I would like to turn the conference over to Jocelyn Bauer. Poll and welcome to the National Transportation operation of an operation coalition Talking Operations webinar, it Integrating Weather Information in Traffic Management Center Operations. I will be giving them brief introduction to the Web conferencing environment before turning the session over to Darren from the Federal Highway Administration who will serve as the moderator for Today's seminar. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded. The seminar will last approximately and hour and 30 minutes with the first 75 minutes allocated to the presenters and the final 15 minutes for audience question and answer. During the presentation if you think of no was taken type it into the smaller tech stocks to match the chat area, indicate your question is directed towards much shorter question is for all presenters. Also make sure that you sent question to everyone rather than as the presenters. They will not be able to answer your question during their presentation but some of the questions will be used for that the Q&A session in the last 15 minutes of the seminar. A final containing the ideal and visual portion of the seminar will be posted to the National Transportation coalition website within the next week. I will give that address into the chat box shortly. People attending will be notified of the availability of the presentation, recording and the closed captioning of the seminar. We encourage you to direct others in your office who might not have been able to attend to access the recording. The presentations used today are available for Mac download. The file dialog box on the left side of your screen. To download the file click on the name of the file and click the button the bottom of the down the box that says to say to my Computer. At this time I would like to introduce their. He is the Marketing specialist or the Federal Highway Office of operation and he oversees the outrage of the National Transportation Operations coalition. Prior to joining battle cry when he were to maximal roles with a local small business and another federal agency. I will turn things over to Darren. Thank you, Jocelyn. Welcome to all of you and the NTOC webcast. For the past several years the federal highway road with management program has been working to help TMCs make use of the Advanced Weather - - responding to adverse weather conditions because it has accomplished some great deal in evaluating the state of the practice and identifying the weather integration needs of the day fords around the country. More recently, Federal Highways has the self evaluation and Planning Guide to assist it fords in integration efforts and. My colleague Roemer Alfelor will talk about Federal Highways achievements and current activities in this area and the [ indiscernible ] team will describe the self-evaluation and Planning Guide that they helped develop for FHWA and then hear from four the representatives from the date fords in using the self-evaluation and their weather integration plans and how valuable the process is in improving TMC Operation. With that, I will turn it over for a few introductory slide to my colleague, Roemer Alfelor here in the Office of Operations at FHWA. He has more than 20 years experience in transportation and has been with FHWA for more than eight years and is currently managing FHWA's weather response of transportation management program, that includes weather integrations and TMCs. Before joining Federal Highways he worked for Transportation Consulting firms and 10 firms and hold a degree from MIT, Ph.D. in several and sensible Engineering. With that, attended, take it away. Thank you, Darren. Good afternoon or good morning to everybody, depending on where you are. First of all, I wanted thank you for participating in this webcast. As Darren and said I am currently managing the credit one response to traffic management program area of the road with management program that the battle cry and the station and one of the primary elements of the weather response to traffic management is weather integration in TMCs. For this webcast I will briefly describe what TMC weather integration is all about and what we have accomplished in the past several years. We began looking at to weather integration in TMCs in 2003 with the goal of the document the existing practices, needs and opportunities and challenges, as well as assisting the TMCs with their weather integration activities. Our approach to meeting these goals include developing concepts and measures of integration that we can use to characterize the types and levels of integration among the TMCs. We also want to survey the TMCs around the country to document their integration and practices, and then develop recommendations for improved weather integration, including the development of the self-evaluation Guide. Finally, we want to be able to provide some technical support to the TMCs in implementing the weather integration plans. Since we started working in this area, we have made them lot of progress over the past six years. We have completed the state of the practice survey on TMC weather integration in 2006 in which we documented the existing practices and also we characterized the types and levels of integration throughout the country. For that task [ indiscernible ] was our contractor. One of the recommendations from that study was the development of a TMC weather integration self-evaluation and Planning Guide. Last year we completed and published that Guide and Battelle was also our contractor for that task. We also work with two TMCs in Sacramento and Milwaukee in conducting the self-evaluation as well as developing the weather integration plans. Rob Helt and Mike will talk about that and the use of the results of that. Now, [ indiscernible ] will give you more detailed information about the self evaluation guide that we develop. Briefly, what the G-7 does is help the TMCs evaluate their needs and opportunities for enhanced whether opportunities by identifying whether conditions, the impact on TMC operations as well as identifying what tools they need to respond to those conditions. The guy consists of two products. One is the manual document and another is an electronic tool that helps the TMC go through the information and provide integration strategies. The TMC then uses the recommended strategies to develop the weather integration plans. Chris Cluett will walk you through this in more detail as well as how you can get them copy of the Guide. As I mentioned earlier, the Sacramento Regional Traffic Management center is the first to use the Guide and develop a weather integration plan and we are working with Sacramento in implementing the weather integration plan and Brian and Mark will talk about their experience and progress. We also developed marketing and development plan for the guide and to promote it and make sure that the TMCs around the country are aware of it. This NTOC webcast is part of that plan. We are now working with five other TMCs around the country in conducting the self-evaluation using the Guide in addition to Sacramento, you will hear from three other TMCs, Colorado Springs, the day fords in Louisiana and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Whatever we learn from the TMCs we will use to update or improve the guide. This is my final slide and as a final note, I want to thank you, Michael, Rob, Brian, Chris and Vince to talk about their experiences and encourage those in the audience, especially those that work in TMC plans to take advantage of the Guide and the potential benefits to your agencies because that is it. Thank you. Thank you, Roemer. With that, I will turn it over to Chris Cluett with the Battelle Research Center. He has a degree from--And is now research leader with Battelle in Seattle and has managed numerous resource projects--for the FHWA. Chris? Thank you, very much, Darren. First of all I want to acknowledge the members of our Battelle Team. I think most of them are on the call. [ indiscernible ] is in our Washington office, Fred with McFarland management is in Boise, Idaho. Leon Osborn is with Meridian environmental technology and Kevin in Texas. The self-evaluation and Planning Guide that Roemer introduced to you is available in it electronic form. I put up the URL on the slide here and you will be able to access that in the archive version of the webcast that will be available shortly afterwards. It essentially, the Battelle team has been supporting a number of Transportation Management Centers in trying to increase the level of weather integration in their operations. Broadly speaking, the steps in this process start out with a self-evaluation move into the development of an integration plan and it is and in those two components that we are mostly focusing the discussion today. The final step is to take that integration plan and implement it. So, what, exactly, do we mean by weather integration, and what is involved? There our a number of pieces to this. Roemer mention a few of them. Start out by identifying the and the weather conditions that the TMC House to deal with, understanding what the impacts of those conditions are on traffic operations, identifying where the TMC is currently with respect to the integration of information in the TMC about weather, identifying needs that the TMC experiences, the things that they would like to be able to do that they are not currently doing, additional information they might to have, and then identifying and selecting specific weather integration strategies that can help them meet those needs. This slide has a fairly simplified flow chart of the self-evaluation process. Step one goes through the four components of characterizing the weather, the impact that that weather has on operations, identify existing levels of the weather integration and then identifying needs that could be met by higher levels of the weather integration. Step two, and essentially, involves a process that is built into the Guide that matches weather integration strategies with the needs that have been identified and then further, beyond that, the system provides a interactive capability that lets TMCs explore various alternatives possible strategies through adjusting the priority that they associate with the various needs. Finally, taking those strategies that everybody agrees makes the most sense for the TMC and building and integration plan around those. Examples of weather integration in TMC operations are shown here. There are many more that are included in the Guide but include things like increased internal weather information, resources, bringing camera imagery, satellite imagery and the like into the TMC, increasing external weather information and forecast, expanding the availability of weather information and so on. If we pick on one of those, the expanded availability of weather information, you can see five levels of integration, leveled one being the lowest level above not having any availability of weather Information in a TMC, on up to the most complex level of available information, which would include having a meteorologist on staff for periods of time to help with weather forecasting and interpreting weather information feeds that are coming into the TMC. This is a simplified matrix that will give you the idea of the various items of integration might be associated with integration levels. This would be part of the process that the TMC would go through to identify where they are, currently, with their level of weather integration. The next step, then, as mentioned earlier, is to identify operational needs for Managing weather. There are 22 need statements that are organized in categories and the team that is working through the self-evaluation will go through those needs and identify the ones that are most applicable based on the information they have assembled about the kind of weather they have to deal with and the impact that weather is having on them. Then, they go through a printing process to identify what needs are the highest priority and which are of lower priority. The Guide will take the identified high priority needs and associate them with it strategy is that are part of the system and identify for the NTOC those strategies that will most meet the needs that they have expressed. It is kind of an a mapping process of the strategies that will minimally address each of the identified operational needs. The system clearly points to the next successive higher levels of integration above the current level that the TMC says they are at and allows the TMC team to select a strategy that might be below the optimal strategy to fully meet their needs but is still where they are now and constitutes an interim pathway to meeting the need. The Guide provides detailed information on each of these selected integration strategies, including a definition, the complexity of costs associated with implementing such a strategy and other requirements associated with it. And several TMCs are currently working on this and you will be hearing from a number of . Over the past couple of years these TMCs have been engaged in the process development plan and one of them, Sacramento, is now in the implementation phase and a important part of this activity is to provide feedback to improve the Guide and. We intend to continuously update the Guide to be as relevant as possible. In addition, we are involved in evaluating the effectiveness of these implementations and that will contribute to further improvements. The next phase of the webcast will be interesting presentations from four of the TMCs as listed here. Each of these TMCs is facing unique weather challenges and conditions and integration opportunities. They are at different points in the process, it did 13 Planning and implementation. I think you will get a good cross-section of experiences to help you better understand the whole weather integration program. Thank you, very much. Thank you, Chris is. And has begun first will hear from Brian Simi. He is on the California Department of Transportation, District three. He is the electrical system branch chief for Caltran District three that is the Sacramento metropolitan area and is responsible for that the configuration and system administration of ITS elements in the Region. Brian, take it away. Thank you, Darren. I will be introducing mark shortly. First, I will give you the background. Our TMC which we call the regional transportation center was built in 2000 and located in Rancho Cordova east of Sacramento. Our Facility is also-we are co located with the California Highway Patrol. Our TMC shares of a floor with the 911 cell phone [ indiscernible ] dispatch. It is the focal point for Information within our district, the District three region of California and that is where all of our information from our network of ITS elements, advisers, radios, roadway weather information systems come into there and then through the day for we provide traveler information through the end media and through other resources in the field. We, primarily, focus our efforts on the state and interstate highways within our region. We also dispatch, have a maintenance dispatched for all of the Caltran resources for maintenance vehicles and the like. This diagram shows where some of the information-clarify how the information flows. I will point some of these things out. The data flows into the TMC and then back out to the various resources such as [ indiscernible ] as well as field units. We get information from our maintenance personnel and back out to what we call the TMT team such as portable signed trucks and talk to field units to the dispatch center. gift to a general idea of the information flow at that level. Our region covers-this map here shows that if I can get the pointer to show, this shows the region that district recovers. Primarily, we focus-we cover the Sacramento metropolitan area that covers parts of the Eldorado and yellow County for this general area of. The focus on the weather standpoint is not only covering the metro area but these mountain areas that cover the I-80 and U.S. 50 that goes to the Reno, Tahoe area and all of these routes carry over-the route into the Sacramento area cover over 180,000 EDT and some of the mountain areas into the 5,320,000 depending on the time of your back with recreational traffic. The main issues we have, the weather conditions we deal in our district are fog, disability and disability issues--A very dense fog that sits in areas after periods of heavier rain and subsequent to that we get low temperatures that cause fog to form. That is very dense in a lot of our valley areas and they are at about post sea level because we have areas that this forms in random areas because we have several bridges exposed to high wind and those are over river areas and we have long viaduct section's - - it does not have been extremely frequently in the valley, but it does happen. It is because the bridge deck is so long that it tends to get colder than the normal pavement. We also have issues with snow in the Sierra Mist for Interstate I-80 and U.S. 50 and periods where high winds combined with snow accumulate debt accumulation creates whiteout conditions because those are our main weather issues. Right now I am going to turn this over to Mark. Mark was our branch chief for our TMC Operations for over six years in District three is because he has recently moved onto the Sacramento council government where he provides them-he is working as the ITS coordinator. We are fortunate to have Mark here to come back and talk about the actual integration plan that he, basically, was instrumental in developing for District three. Thank you, Brian. Where we are at here, the TMC, when I was running that during the period when we worked through the tool, we felt we could definitely do better and have room for improvement, as far as our weather integration and how we were presenting that towards our operations, both through travel information as well as coordinating with the field unit. The use of the tool [ indiscernible ] understanding our knees and provided a framework for the evaluation of our systems and where we were at and assisted us with developing an integration plan. This site year points out what, probably, most TMCs feel are associated with their day to day operations, that they are aware of different weather sources. They know they can probably utilize better field RWIS coverage and data. Oftentimes we lack standard procedures as how to get things done, etc., etc.. We understand what the benefits of those would be. As such, it led us into the self evaluation process and allow us to be a solid participant in. The process, itself, to make it happen, we tap a wide range of perspectives to really come into the feeding of the self-evaluation tool. We contacted both our maintenance personnel as well as various operation personnel throughout the region, not just in the TMC, but within a multitude of our operational areas within the region. One thing that we became aware of is how spots or very limited applications of a particular weather integration strategy could quickly overwhelm the needs by saying that we had already adopted that particular strategy. A lot of our people would say that I know of one location or one place where that particular application bits, and as such it would end up saying that the toll would indicate that we had, indeed, already adopted that particular strategy, where, indeed, it was in a single location. To mitigate for that, we divided our larger region as Brian described as a Valley and Mountain region and rammed through the process in two different steps. I highly recommend this for that other states that utilize the tool if you find you have different-you are faced with different needs or different weather classes of the events as we are in our particular region of. It was not a trivial exercise to go through, but the results were very thorough and very helpful. In both cases as we did the valley and mountain regions it took us about two week's worth of time to develop the consensus and enter the data into the tool before we could get further into our analysis. The self-evaluation, the results we came out with was that we began to understand how the widespread use of the elements and techniques as well as new tools would help provide a better picture of our weather and allow us to do a better reporting to the public and we would likely improve our overall results if we could tie some of those publications where we had particular techniques utilized in a single location to be able to share that more region-wide and provide us with much greater benefit as well as help us to identify some new techniques that we really had not considered previously. The self evaluation-here, within our district, we realized our organizational structure really did not allow the RTMC to receive a truly integrated system. Our organizational structure does not require the field maintenance crews to really be reliant upon direction from the TMC. So, that allowed us to be able to separate, kind of, what went on in the TMC from the field is because the maintenance people ended up leading their own tasks and the RTMC operators are focused on providing information to the public, both--Also indirectly through the media. As we found as participants, it release indicated positive results speak our true goal was to help out internal to the TMC to move quicker. As we work through the self-evaluation practice it highlighted and confirm our initial feelings that there was, indeed, Room for improvement and discover that there were likely benefits to be associated with increasing the coverage of our distribution, as well as it really help all of the various participants both from our maintenance and internally to understand the requirements of the data flow into and out of the TMC. The weather integration plan, itself, we came up with a few key elements that are listed on the screen and as we went through this process, aggregate, once again, it helped us tremendously in defining what these key element areas were and completed our plan in April of 2008. With that I will pass it to Brian, again, to continue on talking about our implementation. Thank you, Mark. After the output of this implementation, the integration plan, rather, the next up was to implement the strategy is. One thing to note is that this is after most of the other regions are just doing the integration. We are moving on to the implementation team our district. We have broken down and have an implementation plan of 12 tasks. I will go over them here quickly. Potentially, these are all rolling out of the integration plan is because that is identifying more weather information-identifying weather information sources, properly maintaining and calibrating the weather resources we have, the weather information we have, developing procedures to assemble and assess weather information, identified, procuring and install an additional weather sites, establish alert thresholds. In other words, trying to determine what levels were appropriate for our area and what the operator should and when they should be triggered into action and what type of action. That goes more into defining the alert mechanisms. Also, creating the decision matrix and flow chart that provides more information to the operator and defining procedures for implementing advisories', in other words, implementing the older approach. All of those, the previous five bullets are all an effort to better document the steps needed, document the steps and properly for what to do with certain weather situations and, lastly, is really to provide training to the operators so they know how to implement these new alerts. One of the things we want to do, as well, is identify a weather coordinator and have a single focal point here at the day's court to sort of managed the weather information. This is a little bit difficult, because we are a 24 hour Operation. That is difficult because of the staffing and 24 hour shift situation. That is-that brings into the next slide, the lessons we have learned from the implementation process. Resource allocation is critical. We need to have-our management fees to the in full support of this in order to work properly. That means having either existing sap redirected to it-The exercise to improve data quality. It basically it says-We look that the information and know where we have to improve our weather data. Also, awareness of other weather data that might be available. A lot we found is available online already and also had our operations staff more aware of what weather data is out there. The next steps we see that we are still trying to complete our integration plan going through the tasks of the integration plan, we are identifying the information sources, as I mentioned earlier. We are refining the need for weather Information and compare what is already available. What is available on the Internet and internally, as I already mentioned. Deploying more sensors, calibrating existing sensors and also revising the procedure, the TMC procedures here for using this weather information. Overall, developing a better alert system to help modify operators of weather conditions affecting the highway and, of course, to follow up with training for geckos operators. With that, that completes our presentation. Our goal is to actually have this implementation, this integration, rather, dun by October of this year so we can begin evaluation. With that, I will send it back to Darren. My time is up. Thank you, Brian and Mark, as well. Next we have Michael Muffoletto who works of for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and is the supervisor of the Shreveport, Louisiana Traffic Management center and will be presenting on behalf of four different Louisiana TMCs that took part of the weather integration study. Michael? Thank you, very much. First off I want to give you background of the TMCs in Louisiana. We have three regional TMCs located in Louisiana. Along with that we have the statewide TMC that is based out of Baton Rouge that oversees the entire state and interstate systems. They all did take part in the weather integration process because all of the TMCs manage and operate cameras and, DMSs, RVDs and [ indiscernible ] that patrol the interstate and regions because this is a map looking where the different labs are located for those that are not familiar with the area. Some of the day when conditions that affect the TMC conditions are heavy rain events that we carry your around that the flooding of low-lying areas and fog that is widely prevalent in the seven parts of the state and one of our main weather concerns. It can cripple traffic and we have had many fatalities in the past due to it that stashed waterways and are swamps or--We have vocational winter weather activities, mainly in the northern portions of the state that can occur in the central and southern parts of the state. Currently, in regards to the use of the weather information, the TMCs use daily weather forecast. The objectives of the TMCs for getting involved in the weather integration process was to take than the more proactive approach to handling adverse weather conditions and the impact on the roadway. In the past they acted more in a reactive way and the standard policies or procedures were in please for handling extreme weather events. This is extruding tropical weather events to which the state already has extensive plans and procedures in please in the event of hurricanes and evacuation's because some of the benefits to TMC perhaps anticipating going into the process were to improve targeting of weather messages and information to motorists. We are looking to develop and implement policies and procedures in regard to adverse weather and improved communication with outside agencies and the flow of information into the TMCs. I will go over the broad question process and how it all came together. After meeting with Battelle and the consultants with weather to discuss the project and were given the self-evaluation Guide the supervisors from each day for met together and decided for each TMC to individually go through the Guide. After each TMC completed the Guide we met again to discuss the results and in comparing these results we decided there was enough correlation between all four of the Guides to use one Guide for the entire state and we also decided to exclude the tropical weather events from the guide due to the existing plans and procedures already in please for such event. In regards to the Guide itself it was very straightforward and the date fords had no problems filling it out by ourselves and never needed any help from Battelle to go through the process because it took about an hour to complete. Some of the results and keep weather integration strategy is that were produced from the Guide, this is kind of-I am sorry, the first and one of the main things that the TMCs look to achieve from the process were to implement policies and procedures for handling adverse weather conditions by making quick reference what cards for each day for operator workstation. If the operator already hiked their policies in please for handling these days when incidents-another strategy is better coordination and communication within agencies with the state to better and improve the flow--during the weather events. Examples would be during the heavy rain event where flooding is occurring, police officers on the scene might need to Contact the to afford to let us know what is going on. This better opens the line of communications between the agents and the TMC route that has been beneficial for all aspects of the operations because of another strategy is purchasing RWIS Road weather information systems and testing them at a few sites. Currently we have no that are used in TMC Operations. One of the main issues financial concerns. In the past they have not had the best of experience is mainly due to upkeep and having someone able to take the information coming in and using it to benefit Traffic Operations. We hope to possibly purchase of a few RWIS systems that are relatively low cost and putting it in a few key sites on heavily Travel sections that expense and high amount of fog activity and proving that they can be beneficial and worth investing money into more of the censors around the state in the future. Another strategy that has already been implemented is we are purchasing NOAA weather radios to help the operators pass-another strategy that we are looking to implement is the former relationship with the state climatologist. This is another way to have more permission and understanding of the weather events that are coming in and the possible impact on traffic. Lastly, another key strategy is appointing an operator within the TMC. They would look 91 events and that would possibly be occurring that day and make sure that each TMC is aware and what to do for it. Some of the benefits of the self-evaluation, the main benefits were realizing the need and take a more pro-active approach to weather events because the process was an excellent way to open discussion and look that the current state of the operation and bringing up ideas and ways to improve in regards to handling weather events and safety on the roadways because that is the main objective of all of this is to improve safety. The plan itself, this is really the spot in the process that we are currently working on at the date fords. Once finished with the Guide, the next up was to formulate this plan to put the strategies in place because that is to assist the day fords to understand what reserves set and tools on our credit being used and identifying future tasks that can be done to improve operations and provide a more pro-active approach to managing weather. Some of our expectations for our plan-these are some of the things I have already gone over but the immediate plans are instructing the policies and procedures for events, reaching out to outside agencies to improve communication during these events, collecting and then selecting the weather coordinator at the TMC and improved the overall flow of the weather information into the TMC. In the short term, some of our short-term expectations are looking to purchase a you RWIS systems, like I mentioned, for select locations and see what benefit we can gain and provide that information to the state to see if the systems would be beneficial to expand to other locations throughout the state and looking into other weather-related systems and sensors. This is our path forward and what we are looking to do in the future. We have decided it would be beneficial to revisit this process annually and see what kind of progress we have been making and go through the Guide again and see what type of strategies have been working and what might not have been beneficial and see what improvements can be made. I would say this overall assessment of the process has been very beneficial--Improve operations with regard to weather and has helped as pinpoint areas that the TMC can improve the response and more pro-active approach to adverse weather conditions. I would highly recommend this to other TMCs. It was not great round table discussion to get ideas flowing on ways we can improve and, overall, the better when it comes to weather. That will do it. All right. Thank you, very much, Michael. For anyone keeping score we have two more. And 123 in a reminder for get anyone listing on the call, if you have them requesting you can type into the tab box on the left-hand side of your screen. Our next. Is Rob Helt and the principal--Traffic Management center, engineering addition. They are - - operations and optimization of 564 traffic signals. The TMC also operates and maintains the advanced traffic management system that allows it to respond to decongestant, along with incident mitigation and emergency traffic responses because take it away, Rob. Good afternoon. This is Rob Helt from Colorado Springs traffic's. For someone to start with a thank you to the Battelle Team, FHWA and our team that made this available. What makes us unique to this study is that although we are a City of Colorado Springs Traffic Management center, we also respond to events on Interstate 25. It is a portion of Interstate 25 that runs from Monument hill south of Denver, Colorado towards Pueblo. We do with local intersections and roadways and Interstate 25. We do arterial incident Management. A big part of what we do, also, is in coordination with the Colorado Department of Transportation. We need to thank Ken and his group of in Golden. Record and very closely with CDOT. We are thought of as the third traffic operations center of Colorado's. There is one in Golden, hanging lakes and also one in Colorado Springs. We are going to cover, real quickly, on basically through Interstate 25 through the city of Colorado Springs, we run over a thousand, 100,000 vehicles a day, ADT. The population, is where Miles, traffic signals, roadway miles, Interstate 25 miles are covered in B slide. Weather that affects us, as no affects capacity intersections and affected areas of the roadway. One thing that we also deal with is lightning. In daily operations, lining up that's on traffic signals and our network, scheduled responses, after hour responses. Also, with wind, when damage to signals and also high wind warnings on the interstate. The need for enhanced weather integration-1 things that we deal with is with weather integration we are always behind the curve. We tried to develop strategies during an event. We develop response procedures and weather integration is triggered to prepare and put in place.