Hello and welcome to the Talking Operations web conference on Road Weather Management. My name is Jennifer Symoun. I will be giving a brief introduction to the web conferencing environment before turning the session over to Ben McKeever who we are very pleased to have as our moderator for today’s seminar. Today’s seminar will last approximately an hour and 30 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the presenters and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. During the presentations, if you think of a question, you can type it into the smaller text box in the chat area on the lower left side of your screen. Indicate who 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. lease also make sure that you send your question to Everyone rather than just the Presenters. The presenters will be able to answer your questions during the question and answer session in the last 30 minutes. A file containing the audio and the video will be posted within the next week. I will type that address into the chat box shortly. We encourage you to share it with your coworkers. The PowerPoints will be able within the next week on the site. Attendees will notified of the PowerPoints, recording and the closed captioning of the seminar. I would like to introduce Ben McKeever. Ben oversees the realtime traveling program and the Road Weather Management program. Prior to joining U.S. D.O.T. he worked at the melt transportation commission in Oakland, California. Prior to joining MTC he worked for eight years as a consultant on numerous projects with emphasize on ITS planning, design, and implementation. He is a registered civil engineer in California and Missouri. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you for joining today for our webinar. I'm going to let Jennifer queue up the first presentation today, which is an overview of the Road Weather Management program. I want to give you a high-level overview before I turn it over to the others who will speak more indepth on their various projects. Okay. To provide backgrounds on the program, first we need to examine the problem. We know that from research that the 24% of all crashes are on slick pavement or under adverse weather conditions. About 25% nonrecurrent delay is caused by adverse weather. If we can do something to impact the impact of adverse weather we can make a big dent in the surface transportation problem. In addition, congestion impacts productivity. Weather-related delays at about $3. 4 billion to freight costs annually. It also has an impact on the environment. The congestion has an impact on air quality. Inefficient use of chemicals can affect our watersheds and infrastructure. Our vision of success is on your screen. The way we hope to do this is to achieve anymore, anywhere radio weather information. That's our tag line for the program. The Road Weather Management started at FHWA back in the '90s. It got started with SAFETEA-LU in 2005. Specifically SAFETEA-LU 5308 established the R&D program. Our program has been set up to follow the recommendations that come out of that report. We're directed to improve road weather information throughout the United States. The multidisciplinary stakeholder included NOAA, national science foundation and AASHTO. The weather enterprise are the ones that package the information, provide upcoming weather conditions and events. Fundingwise the SAFETEA-LU legislation allots $5 million per year for a four-year period dating back to 2005. Tomorrow we'll be starting the final fiscal year of our guaranteed funding. After we anticipate continued funding, either through new legislation or the ITS program. The program so far has been successful, we anticipate getting continued funding. Want to talk about the structure of the Road Weather Management program. Following the SAFETEA-LU guidelines we've organized it into four areas. The first is the stakeholder coordination. We have meetings every year in the summer. In addition we also have MDSS meetings. One of our major stakeholders is NOAA. Their business is also weather. NOAA has not really focused as much on the surface transportation aspects of weather. They've been working with the aviation and maritime industry. We're working hard to make sure that surface transportation is on their radar well. One of the other areas that the program focuses on is applied research. We do a lot of work, as far as developing decision support tools, and also weather response to traffic management is another area of applied research that we're starting to dive into. We'll do more work moving forward. The third area that we have is the technology transfer and training and education. We have a really good website on the FHWA operations, dedicated to Road Weather Management, you can use the research identification tool, we have best practices and various publications. We have courses online also. Of course, we have events such as the MDSS product demo showcases. We'll talk more about these, also, in some of the upcoming presentations. The final area is the performance measure and evaluation. We recognize the importance of showing that tax dollars are spent wisely and having a positive impact on the surface transportation system. We spend a good amount of our program dollars trying to do evaluations of the major projects. And also coming up with good performance measures to make sure we're able to capture the benefits of the work we're doing. Just a quick slide here. I mentioned the best practices. I wanted to highlight this. This is one of the top ten visited sites on the FHWA operations website. One of the most popular web pages I should say. This is over 30 case studies. You can get basically, information on what state D.O.T.s are doing from a wide range of topics. A lot of good information there, if you haven't listed that. A lot of people are finding a lot of good use out of that, it's a good tool. Now over to the rest of the agenda here today. We'll talk about the various programs, some of which I have talked about in the overview. Ray Murphy and Dean Kernan will talk about MDSS. Roemer Alfelor and David Yang will present the Weather-Responsive Traffic Management. I will give an overview of the Clarus Initiative. I will then turn it over to Brenda Boyce to talk about the system itself. Then some quick updates on VII. With that our next speaker is Ray Murphy. Ray provides technical assistance in support of the department's goals. Ray joined FHWA in 2001. Ray holds a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering. He served as an officer for ten years in the U.S. Navy. Ray? Thank you, Ben. I appreciate that. Good morning, good afternoon, good day to everyone. As we know, we all know winter road maintenance is a challenging endeavor for any highway maintenance agency. Be it a state D.O.T. or county, or municipal. With highway snow and ice split second decisions have to be made as to when to offer traffic warnings, what de-icing materials to use, and how plowing will be routed. These decisions determine the safety and mobility of the driving public. In the '90s the program saw a gap between the transportation community and the weather forecasting community. It was decided at that time to invest in the development of the maintenance decision support system, the federal pro toe type, MDSS. The goals were to improve safety and mobility and improving productivity in a cost-effective manner. Through partnerships with state transportation agencies, national labs and stakeholder community of public transportation agencies, including the private sector MDSS has evolved from a concept to a functioning application. It is a computer-based tool that provides winter maintenance personnel with route specific weather forecast information and treatment recommendations. It's pretty well broken down into four different modules. And this first -- the top module is where your road weather information and different models are taken into. It's then fed into what they call an data fusion module. Road and weather information is fused, all of the data is ingested. That goes into the third module then, where the rules of practice for antiicing, de-icing, treatment recommendations is customizable for that specific agency. Then it's delivered into a graphical user interface display. Which should be noted this GUI was designed from practitioners from several state D.O.T.s. Here's an example of the display that you would see. It provides route specifically weather and road condition forecasts. It also optimizes treatment recommendations for treatment type, application rate, and timing. It provides more efficient use of salt and other de-icing materials. Pretty much in a nutshell it's a better use of man power and equipment, it offers near realtime road condition reporting. It has features where you can use for training for unseasoned maintenance personnel using historic playback . MDSS was not by any means developed in a vacuum. As this slide shows, we've been quite successful with stakeholder participation from a majority of state D.O.T.s throughout the country, along with the private sector and international participation. In addition to the great success we've had over the past eight years, our most recent meeting was last month in Nevada. 28 D.O.T.s were there, in addition to private sector representatives, academia and international participation. 33% of the attendees were first-time attendees. The focus was updates on development and deployment of new systems throughout the country and discuss the importance of cost-benefit analysis and shared experiences from last winter. As I noted already, we firmly believe that MDSS has been quite successful in building new markets, several have emerged. We now have a portion of the country that have MDSS provided by meridian and DTM, along with MDSS services provided by [ Indiscernible ] and also MSI corporation. What is new and updated? We're now using what they call the metro road temperature forecast model. We got that from Canada. We're also integrated fixed and mobile camera data, along with the new alerting system. We also now offer an archived playback for forecast and treatment recommendations. The federal prototype now has automatic vehicle location, and playback support. There's an improved GUI. We've made access to updated software via the web. It should be noted that the federal prototype is an open source, available to anyone. 5.1 will be available this fall. We completed developing the MDSS deployment guide recently. It focuses on helping transportation agencies prepare for MDSS deployment and maximize their benefits of the MDSS application. The guide was developed with the help of a panel comprised of state D.O.T.s, private sector representatives, and the FHWA division office. The primary audience are state and local personnel responsible for procuring, operating and evaluating MDSS tools, as well as for private sector vendors that provide MDSS services to transportation agencies. The guide describes general MDSS capabilities, benefits, and implementation challenges. It includes real world experiences of deployers, and documents lessons learned. It will soon be available as an electron document. Over the past year FHWA partnered with AASHTO and several other agencies, along with the private sector to develop three free regional support systems. The goal was to encourage implementation of this technology. It was created to be a neutral information exchange environment that provided an opportunity for transportation agency decision makers to gain practical, unbiased, well rounded, hands on experience with new improved products. The first was hosted by Nebraska Department of Roads back in May. The second by Pennsylvania D.O.T. just last month. The last was hosted by Idaho. Dean Kernan he was an active partner in all three product demonstration showcases. Each year there's over 1300 people killed on snowy, slushy and icy pavement. Annually we spend billions on snow and ice control. I wanted to take a moment to reemphasize the benefits on why transportation agencies should be encouraged in making a smart investment in their winter maintenance program by adding MDSS to their tool box. There's potential cost savings that can be achieved. Managers can more effectively employ resources and it will improve your consistency and material application rates. If you don't realize this, there may be a potential salt shortage this winter. We all should be stewards of the environment. MDSS maximizes transportation agency's responsiveness no customers' needs and expectations. Dean will now share with you why Illinois D.O.T. believes MDSS is a smart investment. This is Ben. I will introduce Dean first. He has worked with the Illinois dot supervising employees. He was selected as the 2007 district technician of the year. He is a member of the stated with snow and ice committee, serves as a chairman. Dean serves as the district with snow answer ice trainer. With that I will turn it over to Dean to give his presentation. Dean, are you there? I'm sorry, I was still on mute. [ Laughter ] Thanks, Ben and also Ray for the introduction. We spent 22 years behind the wheel of a snow plow. I got to see both ens of what we're talking about here. As a supervisor I'm allowed to make decisions in regard to man power and materials and the frequency of applications. Those are all primary components. Today we're going to discuss the cost-benefits of a storm that our weather provider, DTN, tracked across district 22. I live where you see the star there, in Henry county. The district is district 2, we had the storm there. Before I get started, I think you want to hear statics about Illinois to understand why the decisions we make are so important. These will come into play later. You will get to see the benefit costs of MDSS for my district and the state at large. We have 42,800,000 lane miles. As you can see by the little map on the side we have nine directs in five regions. They're divided into team sections. For the most part that makes up 165 garages. We also -- part of the decision making is our teamsters, we do have a contract, their fairly well paid, that also comes into play. We have 60 RWIS sites. Some of the practices here in Illinois, we've been employing antiicing methods for 15 years. Some of the garages are experimenting with some ag products. Right now we're using the treatment rules aligned with the FHWA. Some of the vision and direction that we see that Illinois is going to go into is sharing this information among our districts and surrounding states. We want to become more involved with MDSS. This was our first year of using MDSS through DTN. Also I would like to see us add AVL to the trucks. The storm that we'll talk about was our 31st event for the season. We had 1 to 3-inch predicted across the district. It was tracked on February 28 and 29 of this year. Like I said, it was in district 2 in northwest Illinois. You will see the decisions that we made and how our weather provider was used. Later on we will discuss the cost-benefits, and look at the state in general. To go into it, the day prior DTN predicted 1 to 2 inches. We really didn't have much to do to prepare for the day before on this event. We always hook up our trucks every night. In the morning the lead workers will assign the crews. The next slide shows us the forecast at 10:00 a.m. Here's the reason this becomes so important, at 10:00 a.m. is when we decide we will send our night shift home to rest up and be prepared for possible call-in that night. The time is important for us. We looked at our forecast and we did send our night shift home. They're instructed to be home, rest up, and be free of drugs and alcohol. We see that the radar is showing that the precipitation is showing up in the southwest part of the district, it's in the form of snow. The purple is snow advisory from the national weather service. Here comes some of our contract issues, our normal operating hours are 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. We have to make a decision to keep the day shift on or release them. Based on the information given to me by DTN and the weather forecasts and the pavement temperatures I sent the day shift home. Because the weather temperatures were so above freezing and not predicted to drop until 6:00 p.m. it was a good decision to make and a money saver. By this time I'm inspecting the roads and bridges. I sent the day shift home. I checked with the rest of the district, they had done the same thing. This shows so you can see better the road temperatures and the truck icon. You can see the treatment recommendations from the FHWA at this time. The little red truck denotes a change. That will come up here in a little bit. Our past practices would have been to keep the crews on and monitor the roads. You can save many dollars in fuel, materials by following this. I was able to go home, relax, have a little supper with my family, I would sneak into check the computer to look at what was happening. At 6:00 p.m. the temperatures were dropping. I did look out of the window. The ground was beginning to turn white. The roads were showing accumulation. I rechecked roads and bridges. I called in the crews at about 6:30. The direct called their crews in at about 9:30. I checked the weather again. I looked to see what they were recommending for our MDSS treatment recommendation. It shows we would be receiving less than half inch per hour. And that the recommendation was to use a light spread at 100-pounds per lane mile.