This study illustrates and discusses the installation and operation of two Road and Weather Information Stations (RWIS) in Austria (Wald and Golling, Land Salzburg) in 2007 which incorporated new measurement and data display technology. The technology includes the Vaisala remote optical non-intrusive road surface state sensor DSC 111 “Spectro” (providing among other measurements an estimate of the friction coefficient) , the Vaisala optical non-intrusive sensor to measure road surface temperature DST 111 “Cyclo”, a video camera, Vaisala display software to plot all measured road surface and other meteorological data along with a time stamped video picture of the road surface on a PC screen. All data and pictures are transmitted by GPRS (General Package Radio Services) every 5 minutes to a central Vaisala server and are stored for future access and analyses. Using this new measurement technology which provides among other measurements independent high resolution water-, ice- and snow- layer thicknesses on the road surface a real world example is given using these thickness values to explain why ice slipperiness can exist even after the application of de-icing chemicals. Preliminary user experience indicates a much enhanced and easy to use information data base for winter maintenance decision makers, high user acceptance by decision makers, an excellent training tool (road surface pictures), the potential of greatly reduced use of de-icing chemicals and road cleaning and de-icing trips due to better and more informed decision making (friction coefficient, high resolution measurement values, PC displayof measurement values and video pictures of the road surface).
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