From local streets to major interstates, bad weather creates hazardous conditions for drivers and slows down traffic. The disruptions and delays cause frustration, while it’s often costly to fix and maintain our highways under severe weather conditions. 

The FHWA knows this, and has been doing work in road weather management for decades to find strategies that make driving easier and safer with rain, snow, ice, fog, high winds, flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme events.   

In October, FHWA officially became a 'Weather-Ready' Nation Ambassador as part of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) initiative aimed at improving the nation’s preparedness and strengthening resilience for extreme weather events. 

NOAA is working to improve accuracy in forecasts and warnings, evolve services to serve community decision makers, and find better ways to communicate risk to stakeholders and the public. As part of the Weather-Ready Nation (WRN) initiative, NOAA partners with federal, state and local agencies, industry, researchers and other groups to prepare communities for potential weather disasters. 

These actions can save lives anywhere - at home, in schools, and in the workplace - before tornadoes, hurricanes or other extreme weather events strike.   

While we have no control over weather, we do have sophisticated data with which to plan and adopt strategies ahead of time that can save lives and minimize widespread destruction. Our strategy is in large part about using technology to gather and disseminate quality information to the right people, which is what our new collaboration with NOAA is intended to do. 

Specifically to highways, being weather-ready means supporting traffic, maintenance crews, emergency managers, and the traveling public in making smart decisions to save lives. Under our Every Day Counts initiative, we’re already working to deploy two distinct road weather management solutions that allow state and local agencies to proactively manage their transportation systems ahead of and during bad weather. 

The first, Pathfinder, was born out of the successful coordination between the Utah Department of Transportation and the National Weather Service local forecast office during the 2002 Winter Olympics. FHWA worked with UDOT to document the processes and then expanded them to be applicable across the country.

Pathfinder lays out a multi-step process on what information to share and how best to do it – before, during and after severe weather events. The idea is to provide the public with consistent messages about road conditions that they can really act upon, such as which roads will see snow accumulation versus those where it will melt and run off or refreeze.

The second, Integrating Mobile Observations (IMO), focuses on vehicle-based technologies. It involves collecting weather and road condition data from sensors on vehicles that can tell the engineers who manage the roads about critical conditions, such as pavement temperature. 

FHWA and NWS teams will work together to better understand the risks associated with extreme weather events to build stronger communities and upgrade their preparedness.  This partnership will help save lives and ensure ours is a Weather-Ready Nation. 

Secretary Foxx has been a leader in seeking opportunities to disseminate innovative technologies and practices to state and local governments through collaborative efforts among federal agencies such as FHWA.

Every Day Counts, in particular, has been a vehicle to accelerate the deployment of these tools to our state and local partners, resulting in faster delivery of benefits to the traveling public and the freight industry. 

These partnerships and the innovation they foster will continue to strengthen our national highway system.