At this time I would like to turn today's call over to miss Jocelyn Bauer. Welcome to the Web Conference on Road Weather Management. I will be giving a brief introduction to the environment before turning the session over to Paul Pisano who we are happy to have as our moderator. Please be advised this is being recorded. The 60 minutes is allocated for presenters and the final 30 minutes will be allocated for question and answer. As many may notice things look at the different. This is our first seminar using our first Web conferencing software. The chat box is on the left side of the screen under the attendee list. If you think of a question you can type it into the small text box underneath the area on the left side of your screen and indicate to your question is directed toward, unless your question is intended for all presenters. Please make sure you are typing in the thin text box and not the large white area. Please also make sure that you send your question to everyone rather than just the presenters. Presenters will be unable to answer questions during the presentations, but Paul will use some of the questions type into the top box for the question and answer session for the last 30 minutes. I would like to remind you that this session is being recorded. A file containing audio and visual portion of this seminar will be posted to the National Transportation Operations coalition website within the next week. I will type that address into the chat box shortly. We in church -- encourage you to allow others to access this recording who could not attend. This will be available within the next week. Attendees will be notified of the availability of the power point through recording and closed captioning. At this time of like to introduce Paul Pisano. Mr.Pisano is the team leader for the road whether management team and the Federal Highway Administration Office of operations. He has worked in several offices at federal highway over the past 20 years serving as team leader for the Traffic Safety Research team before moving to the Office of operations. In his current capacity he is responsible for the program that addresses the effects of weather on all aspects of the highway system including winter maintenance, traffic management and traveler information. Paul's education is civil engineering bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Maryland. That will turn things over to Paul who would give a brief introduction. Thank you. Good afternoon our good morning to everybody you are. Welcome to the talking operations will cast on roads whether management. As Jocelyn said, my name is Paul Pisano and I would like to [ indiscernible ] and you again to the seminar. In looking at the list of attendance. So to those of you are just coming in, welcome and to we hope you find all of this session to be worthwhile and of interest. We have three speakers on today to talk about road weather management. And before we get into the presentations I want to provide an overview of road whether management from the perspective of the Federal Highway Administration and the road rather highway program. First of all this to set the stage of what we consider success to be and what we think success looks like within the program and within all of our stakeholders we see success has been an improvement in mobility and safety by alleviating the effects of weather on the surface transportation system. Our grand goal, I think, but something that I think is totally at table. Another way we look at this is our tagline is to say the roadway to management is about anytime anywhere road and weather information and that means that no matter who you are as a transportation user or operator you should be able to get timely, accurate and relevant information about the weather and how it will affect the surface transportation system so that you can make a more informed decision which would save time, lives or money. The program itself was started -- formerly started in about 1999 when the Office of operations was forms. There certainly was a lot more work that happened prior to that, but this is when it became a target area within operations. Then things changed somewhat, significantly in some levels and not so different and others when SAFETELUE was passed. There is a section 5308 where Congress directed the departments to establish a broad whether R and D program. The heart of the program is to follow the National Research council's reports, where the weather it meets the road and to promote technology and to promote R and D. Congress also directed us to take a multi disciplinary approach by working with folks at the National oceanic and atmospheric association which is [ indiscernible ]. The private sector and nonprofit organizations. And we are also authorized a funding level of $5 million per year for the four years remaining in the bill although our appropriations are never quite that high. We use this as a guide. This is significant on the level that Congress specifically spelled out a road whether R&D program. What was not as significant was it is not something new within the federal highway and we were well on our way to this work. But this did give us a much more clear goal as set out. So what we have within the program is our four objectives to help us achieve the goals and targets that Congress spelled out, these been stakeholder coordination, applied research, technology transfer, training and education and performance management and evaluation. I just have four would slides about each of them. For the purpose of setting context, again of work we are doing within the program. The first, [ indiscernible ], is about in summary building a bridge between surface transportation and [ indiscernible ] and recognizing their knees on both sides that can be met if we both understood each of his environment. There is a lot of work going on, both within building the bridge between transportation and other weather and public and private sector recognizing that we need to work together to make anytime anywhere abroad weather information a reality. The second objective, applied research is where the bulk of our time and money is going. And this is to build integrated solutions bring in advanced weather prediction into the transportation environment and intelligent transportation systems. Some of the activity going on within this objective includes the Clarus initiative which is all about building better right initiation systems and support tools such as the main this support system and whether responsive traffic or transportation management, and these are the three speakers you will be hearing from today speaking about each of these areas. The third area, technology transfer training and education is to advance the state of the practice by raising roadway management committees. It is one thing to develop a solution and another to deploy it and make it available. So this work is going towards help it promote deployment. Then the fourth is to look at all of this from Performance Management perspective. How well are be achieving our goals and doing what it is we set out to do. So we are working to identify measures and working with the ITS program to do other departments studies. That is the overview of the program. There is a lot going on, and I think a lot of good work that we are engaged in with the community, with those of you on the phone now and others. Now, I would like to go ahead and move into our targeted presentation. The first one which is going to be about Clarus. Before I introduce our first speaker, Ralph Patterson, I would like to give a little bit of an overview about the Clarus initiative before Ralph speaks. Okay. This slide is one that says a number of Environmental Center stations that have been deployed by State Department of Transportation's across the country. If we start with this and work that right now there is a huge investments by the state DOT to monitor the conditions of weather and roadway along the nation's highway. If we see that this is an incredible resource and something that we think can be capitalized on, I guess to put it one way. Again, millions of dollars spent by the state to monitor. We are now looking at how to work with the states to make the most of those investments. So what we see as a critical step in achieving that objective is to assimilate the data and make the data available to the public and private sector community who could utilize that information and utilize those observations to provide better road weather information. That is the heart of the Clarus initiative which is one of the 9 ITS initiatives that were started about a little over two years ago, and what Clarus is about, it is an effort to create a robust data assimilation quality checking and data dissemination system. Ultimately we see this as a source of observation that can then be used by the private sector and public sector to turn it into a value added road weather information. The Clarus -- well, let's leave it at that. Again, that is serving as a basis for any time anywhere road weather information. So the focus right now within the Clarus initiative is to build a system that does that quality checking and assimilation of the information. The objectives are to do that system design, develop the system as designs, work with the public and private partners to develop and evaluate these products that the Clarus system enabled and then establish partnerships to move from a demonstration to deployment on a nationwide network. So just really quickly, the status of the initiative is that we have gone through working with the stakeholders, with you all, we have developed a concept of operation. We then had a contract with Nixon Hill to design and build the system. We have gone through a concept and are moving into regional demonstrations which I will talk about in a minute. At the end of up Ralph's presentation. So with that, let me stop and turn it over to Ralph Patterson who is going to be speaking about the Clarus initiative from the perspective of the state DOT and in particular Utah being one of the states that participated in the proof of concept of the Clarus system. Ralph originally originally started as an avalanche forecaster for the highway have Safety program. In 99 Ralph began working for a private consulting firm as the leading neurologists providing site specific forecasts for areas of DOT across the Midwest. During 2002 so late in the pits he initiated the on-site meros program in the traffic operations center was also the lead to his return to Utah DOT as the weather operations manager. Presently his responsibilities include overseeing a staff of four on-site meteorologist located in the center as well as managing the road whether management system. Currently Ralph is on the AURORA board which is a research consortium and sets on the joint research society and intelligence Society of America Committee on surface transportation weather. Ralph holds a bachelor of Science degree in meteorology from the University of Utah. With that I would like to turn it over to Ralph. All right, thanks, Paul. Thanks, everybody. My name is Ralph Patterson I am the WRIS-ESS manager for transportation in Utah. Today we are going to discuss a the a bit about the relationship with Utah and the Clarus program. If I can move this -- there we go. I will talk a the a bit about what Paul mentioned, the proof of concept state and a little bit about my weather operations program here in the Traffic Operations Center. UDOT WRIS-ESS program and the challenges of managing the data as well as quality checking and talk a little bit about the user interface and what we use and what we like to see and then involvement and how we can all help each other out here in the long run. Or maybe even the short run. We will start off with the proof of concept state. As you see, Alaska, Minnesota and Utah were recruited to take place in this proof of concept for the Clarus system. We are all members of what is the AURORA group. To just talk briefly it is pool funded research group and it has 13 states, two Canadian provinces and the Swiss highway authority. The AURORA group has invested time and interest in the whole Clarus initiative which we will talk a little bit about right now. Let's jump into the weather operations program for UDOT. We are a bit unique in the DOT across the state and that we actually have a staff meteorologist, myself, who oversees and manages four Consulting meteorologist here in the Traffic Operations center. And the whole deal behind this is that UDOT is very committed to increase, not just the whole operations [ indiscernible ] of the weather salience across the operations group as well. Everything we do is effected by weather. The other aspects of the operations group is the WRIS-ESS systems. We have some more about 60 sites across the state, and they are a very integral component of what we do in the operations center. Utah has invested significant resources throughout the years starting in the late 80's in WRIS department and certainly in maintaining these systems. So we definitely have a vested interest in how our instrumentation is calibrated and help our operations folks are actually using it. One of the -- just recently we have had a study by WTI, Western Transportation Institute, that concluded that we saved the state, just on the winter maintenance parts alone and only a small portion of that about $2.2 million annually. So we see the cost benefit of having a strong weather operations group and the T-9 component as a very significant factor for our operations. I want to talk some about what our current WRIS practice actually is. As you see on this slide, we have multiple systems. So we have four different vendors that support our WRIS program, and that adds a bit of complexity to the collection and dissemination. It is not totally unruly but it adds another level. And certainly with our partners, you see I listed the National Weather Service, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture of Utah, electrical forecasts center and some of the county EOC. Now we don't share the weather forecast, but what we share here are the instrumentation. In some instances we let them put instrumentation on our right away and we share the data. In other instances we actually share the actual instrumentation itself. So when we start looking at all of our partners and multiple vendors it does get a little bit complex and we really need to blow up everything in. So with that data collection, I did a little cartoon. I depicted with four vendors we have for collection servers and also at our rack in the back room we have our server and site and then a Web server. So as you can see, it does get sort of complex, but again, it is not -- we can definitely manage. It's just gets a little bit interesting as we get into different software and the testing of programs. Again, you can see here the different colors art depicting the different teams that come out of our systems. I wish it was as easy as changing the font color, but unfortunately the disparate datasets have all sorts of challenges embedded in that. For one we had different units, varying polling times and each day scheme is really different according to different vendors. So we take all of these systems and we try to put them into one graphic user interface. So as we get into the nuts and bolts of the data collection, we really found out that there is a huge need for quality control or in this case quality checking. As you can see, the picture on the right-hand side of the screen, this is an example of what the University of Utah is doing right now, very similar to what the Clarus program and Nixon Hill are putting together. So we need to have a quality checking for a few different user groups. If we are looking at things in real time, and now cast it is nice to know if your real observations right now are suspect. In our group that is not the main focus because we have our meteorologist who can look at our data and right away be able to tell if we have a straight line data or something like that that we know is not good. But if we get this data out into the field, field users or pile drivers or engineers, they may not have that experience to say, that is it bad data right away. So we must have some kind of caution flag. As we look into archiving the date of which we do, assuming that everybody is not there going there to archive the data for private use, certainly for forensic use when you are talking about risk management. And it is very difficult to go back to your archived data set and say, that is bad data. That is bad data. You have to identify that and look to all sorts of other datasets so it is nice if we have that caution or suspect flag.