The Finnish Meteorological Institute
Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) mission is to produce high-quality services and scientific know-how on the atmosphere and seas. The Institute uses its expertise to provide services that promote public safety and enhance well-being among people and in the environment, taking into account the needs to maintain preparedness. FMI is Finland’s leading expert in questions concerning the weather and safety, climate
change and adaptation to it, the impact of the atmosphere on the environment and people, and space and atmospheres. The main objectives are best possible information about the atmosphere above and around Finland, to ensuring public safety relating to atmospheric and airborne hazards and to satisfy the requirements for specialised meteorological products.
FMI possesses wide expertise in R&D and end-user services relating to weather and safety, and the impact of the atmosphere on the environment and people. Some of the Institute’s key research areas include development of innovative and intelligent road weather forecasting systems enhancing en-route public safety. These services are delivered to customers and public both in traditional ways and to user/vehicle devices via wireless networking/ cellular systems. FMI has also produced special tailored weather services for derived from meteorological simulation models combined with local measurement data, successfully provided to different locations, A2 highway in Madrid and Sochi 2014 Olympics site area among them. For this purpose, FMI is also studying the possibilities to exchange weather and safety data directly with road users via its experimental combined Road Weather Station and RoadSide Unit (RWS/RSU) concept station
installed nearby FMI facilities in Sodankylä. FMI also possesses Sod5G intelligent winter traffic test field in Sodankylä, with advanced communication capabilities of 5G test network, IEEE 802.11p local area
networking and Wi-Fi. The test field contains also two interactive road weather stations, weather radar in the vicinity area and onboard friction measurement devices, together ensuring accurate road weather
information services and testing capabilities. Operative third-party arctic truck fleet with onboard friction devices and telematics systems allow the testing of advanced real-time road weather services within real
winter traffic conditions.
The Use Case Scenario
In the SafeCOP project FMI is coordinating the development of Use Case 4, focusing on vehicles and roadside units interaction. The main purpose of this scenario is to offer real-time localized road weather information to the vehicles passing the road weather station, based on road weather station local information and meteorological services generated to the road weather station location. “But as we are talking about interactive road weather station, we are also collecting on-board observation information from the vehicles, to enhance the accuracy of weather services and observe very localized critical anomalies in road weather conditions”, explain Dr. Timo Sukuvaara, the project manager and use case leader in FMI. Arctic truck fleet provides excellent source of on-board friction measurements. Furthermore, Sod5G test track allows us careful fine-tuning of the services. The objective of vehicles and roadside units interaction is studied in two alternative manners. Combined Road weather station and roadside unit is interacting with vehicles by using local area vehicular Vehicle-to-infrastructure networking with IEEE 802.11p. In order enhance the local-level range of roadside unit, vehicles are also providing the latest road weather station data they possess with passing vehicles, using IEEE 802.11p vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Researchers Kari Mäenpää and Sakari Kantomaa together with Dr. Sukuvaara are taking care of the pilot test measurements conducted in these scenarios. The third scenario provides entirely different approach for this concept. Instead of using direct interaction between vehicles and roadside units, the data is exchanged with 3G communication, via special IoT cloud provided by ALTEN Finland. With IoT cloud we have more freedom in collecting data for the purpose of vehicles benefit. The friction data is collected continuously from the Arctic truck fleet throughout their whole route, altogether around 260 km. SITOWISE is also collecting the special LOUHI-service data, observations of road and weather condition anomalies whenever observed. This data is stored with
location reference similarly as friction information. Finally the road weather station information is offered as road weather forecast service tailored for the road weather station location. Meteorologist Marjo Hippi
is responsible of the forecast service.
As a result, we have a pilot IoT cloud service, offering versatile road weather and traffic related information for the vehicles based on their current location. “We have developed the special end user pilot application for automatic receiving the local observation data available for the vehicle, whenever such information is produced in the vehicle location”, says Dr. Sukuvaara. The pilot application and underlying services are developed in co-operation of researchers Sakari Kantomaa, Kari Mäenpää and Darya Stepanova.
As the service observation data is coming from the different geographical areas (LOUHI-data from the Southern Finland nearby SITOWISE facilities at Tampere, friction and road weather station service from
Northern Finland around FMI station in Sodankylä), it is not possible to collect all the data sources for the same care. For the demonstration purposes we have integrated to our pilot application a feature to plot
the latest observation data of each source, to verify the continuous collection of every data source. ALTEN Finland has also developed a special map feature for presenting the locations of up-to-date data. It is worth noting that both in the location map and in the service itself, observations are “aging”, and finally removed from the service map when older than 24 hours.
“SafeCOP project offers us great opportunity to showcase our real-time localized services, FMI together with ALTEN Finland and SITOWISE. We are eagerly looking forward to see the future of our service concept”, concludes Timo Sukuvaara.