On-vehicle weather monitoring from Lufft

Why have one weather station when you can have 10 vehicle-mounted units? That’s the message coming from Lufft’s booth at ITS America’s 25th Annual Meeting and Expo. Thomas Stepke, CEO of Lufft USA, said 10 of its vehicle-mounted Mobile Advanced Road Weather Information Systems (MARWIS) can be purchased for the price of one traditional static unit. “With ten sensory moving around the roads, an authority can build up a more comprehensive picture of road conditions in an area than a single stationary sensor,”
June 3, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
Erik Wright of Lufft displays the MARWIS technology

Why have one weather station when you can have 10 vehicle-mounted units? That’s the message coming from 6478 Lufft’s booth at ITS America’s 25th Annual Meeting and Expo. Thomas Stepke, CEO of Lufft USA, said 10 of its vehicle-mounted Mobile Advanced Road Weather Information Systems (MARWIS) can be purchased for the price of one traditional static unit. “With ten sensory moving around the roads, an authority can build up a more comprehensive picture of road conditions in an area than a single stationary sensor,” he said.

Last winter eight DOTs trialled the units mounted on vehicles including buses and supervisors’ cars as well as snow ploughs and gritters, some of which travelled 4,000 miles over the winter period.

The unit’s in-cab readout shows road temperature, condition and grip, water height and ice percentage. In the future Stepke predicts similar sensors will be built into many vehicles as standard fitment.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Kapsch outlines tolling options to combat traffic congestion
    January 11, 2017
    Michael Maitland from Kapsch TrafficCom looks at how the various forms of tolling can help authorities combat traffic congestion and air quality problems while simultaneously raising revenue.
    Read More
  • The benefits of combining enforcement and traffic management
    February 27, 2013
    Jason Barnes considers how combining enforcement equipment with other traffic management technologies might benefit our future – if only the will were really in place to do so. During the ITS World Congress in Vienna in October last year, Navtech Radar and Vysion­ics ITS announced a strategic partnership that would combine the expertise of Navtech in millimetre-wave wide-area surveillance technology with Vysionics’ machine vision-based automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and average speed measurement
    Read More
  • Flir helps Indonesia start tackling congestion
    March 19, 2014
    Indonesia has started tackling acute traffic congestion in Jakarta and Surabaya. When talking about Jakarta, Indonesia’s economic, cultural and political centre, it is very easy to lapse into superlatives. With a population of over 10 million people it is the thirteenth most populated city in the world and the biggest in South East Asia. The official metropolitan area, known as Jabodetabek, is also the second largest in the world. Almost 98% of journeys in Jabodetabek are made by road and the tremendous
    Read More
  • Autonomous vehicles: threat or opportunity for urban mobility?
    January 17, 2017
    According to a new position paper from the International Association Of Public Transport (UITP), autonomous vehicles (AVs) will lead to a dystopian future of even more private car traffic on the road unless they are put to use in shared fleets and integrated with traditional public transport services. The paper, ‘Autonomous vehicles: a potential game changer for urban mobility,’ indicates that, despite the risk of increased congestion due to car travel becoming even more comfort
    Read More

Highlighted Content