Skip to main content

Vaisala forecasts bright future for weather station

Vaisala is showing its latest weather station, which aims to give more accurate results to help provide safety information for road users. The heart of the new station is an onboard Linux computer. This enables it to take data from several sensors and interpolate between them, giving ‘best of breed’ information using the best elements of each sensor, said Daniel Johns, Vaisala’s global head of road and rail.
October 8, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
Florence Girardeau of Vaisala

144 Vaisala is showing its latest weather station, which aims to give more accurate results to help provide safety information for road users.

The heart of the new station is an onboard Linux computer. This enables it to take data from several sensors and interpolate between them, giving ‘best of breed’ information using the best elements of each sensor, said Daniel Johns, Vaisala’s global head of road and rail.

“What we’re also able to do is set rules for using the weather data to set off the variable message signs on roads. The rules that can be engaged here are probably more detailed than ever before; for example, to predict slippery roads.

“Or, if the wind is coming from the west above a certain value, when you know that that becomes important to high-sided vehicles on a bridge or an exposed stretch of road, for example.

“These weather stations are going in all over the globe at the moment. Here at the show we are showing the logic and relays for the first time.”

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Social media a one-stop shop for travel information
    January 20, 2012
    Exponentially widening mobile phone ownership is opening up the field to new ways of obtaining and disseminating better travel information from and to public transport users, via for example social media and tracking riders' phones. Over 50 US transit agencies, including major actors such as TriMet, in the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon, Dallas Area Rapid Transit in Texas, and San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), as well as smaller operators, now have Facebook and/or Twitter accoun
  • When weather warnings get hyperlocal
    August 24, 2016
    David Crawford looks at new technologies to cope with the age-old problem of driving in bad weather. On the 10-year average, between 2005 and 2014 bad weather contributed to more than 1.5 million vehicle crashes in the US each year, resulting in more than 800,000 injuries and 7,400 deaths. These were the findings of analysis by Booz Allen Hamilton of NHTSA data which concluded that the loss of life, hospital treatment and damage to assets costs an annual average of $42bn.
  • 'Choose your own adventure': ITS World Congress All-Access
    September 15, 2020
    The Los Angeles ITS World Congress has moved online: Shailen Bhatt of ITS America explains to Adam Hill why everyone should get involved in this global conversation – and how networking will still be a key element because 'human beings are gregarious, we want to be together'
  • Loop detection still has a part in traffic management
    March 2, 2012
    Bob Lees, co-founder of Diamond Consulting Services, on why the loop detector just refuses to go away. The more strident proponents of newer and emergent detection technologies are quick to highlight what they see as the disadvantages, and hence the imminent passing, of the humble inductive loop. The more prosaic will acknowledge that loops continue to have a part to play in traffic management, falling back on the assertion that it is all a question of application. And yet year after year the loop, despite