November 2013
The second test field campaign has kicked off!
The new winter season has started on the local roads of the Autonomous Province of Trento, and local drivers know this very well since they are obliged to drive with winter gears or with snow chains. In correspondence of the test area of Cadino, a massive and heterogeneous data collection and monitoring campaign has just started with the objective to evaluate in deep the different phenomena that lead to ice formation on the roads and to assess the impact that salting treatments generate on the local environment. The test field campaign is organized through different measurement systems, in particular:
- a "road-weather" station, which will collect different type of data, including both meteorological conditions (e.g. air temperature, relative humidity, presence and type of precipitation, wind speed and direction, etc.) as well as road conditions data (e.g. road surface and subsurface temperature, presence and height of water films, etc.);
- a traffic counting system, which will enable detailed correlation analysis between traffic flows and road weather conditions;
- an air quality monitoring system, which will reveal the possible presence of particulate matters concentration peaks in correspondence of specific treatments;
- a collector of run-off waters, which has been installed with the intention to measure the quantity of salt which is dispersed in the environment as liquid solution.
Moreover, two additional ordinary data collection activities have been organized, namely:
- an automatic survey of the activities of road operators (time and duration of the treatments, treatment types, salt quantities used, number of vehicles traveled, etc.), which is based on the tracking system Trackoid of the local company Hydrologis (for more technical details, please refer to http://rescue.trackoid.it);
- a set of thermal mapping operations, which will be carried out through a maintenance vehicle equipped with special thermal sensors on it. They will be repeated with a certain frequency during all the winter season in order to characterize the asphalt characteristic in all the field test area at different times of the day and in correspondence of specific meteorological events.
The objective of this test field campaign is first to carry out a detailed survey of the current winter road maintenance activities and their related impact on the local environment. Secondly, these empirical activities want to start a preliminary test and validation phase of some of the monitoring and elaboration / forecasting modeling technologies which will be then used in the final system implementation.
