Probabilistic Weather Forecasting for Winter Road Maintenance

摘要

Road maintenance is one of the main problems Departments of Transportation face during winter time. Anti-icing, i.e. applying chemicals to the road to prevent ice formation, is often used to keep the roads free of ice. Given the preventive nature of anti-icing, accurate predictions of road ice are needed. Currently, anti-icing decisions are usually based on deterministic weather forecasts. However the costs of the two kinds of error are highly asymmetric because the cost of a road closure due to ice is much greater than that of taking anti-icing measures. As a result, probabilistic forecasts are needed to optimize decisionmaking.