The application of METRO model to the Czech road data - preliminary results

The goal of this paper is to adopt the METRo model to Czech road data and to present the first experiences. The METRo, a physically based model developed by the Meteorological Service of Canada, produces a 30-hours forecast of road conditions and its temperature. The METRo requires measurements from the road weather stations and forecasts of a numerical weather prediction model as an input data. This first test was performed with road data for the Svojkovice station located at 70.3 km of the motorway D5 (Prague-Plzeň) and the ALADINCZ NWP model forecasts were used. The test was performed for data from the winter 2009/2010. The forecasted surface temperature yielded higher values comparing to the measured ones during the daytime and lower values during the night time. These differences were more pronounced when considering the beginning (October) and the end (March) of the winter season only as a probable impact of high insolation. The accuracy of the forecasted road conditions expressed by the code specifying road conditions ranged between 65 and 80% for all lead times of the forecasts.