Lufft fills in road weather gaps

First published in the Intertraffic Innovations Guide - April 15, 2020

German meteorological specialist Lufft’s award-winning MARWIS (Mobile Advanced Road Weather Information Sensor) is an innovative mobile road weather sensor that monitors road conditions in passing, installed on a car or truck.

As the company points out, slippery and icy roads are a major safety risk for drivers in winter, in some regions even from autumn to spring. Therefore, reliable winter services are a matter of life and death, but even well-equipped teams cannot be everywhere at once. To do their job in the most efficient way, winter services rely on current data on road conditions that help them to prioritise tasks and efforts.

Typically, data comes from road weather sensors that are installed permanently, either integrated into the road (invasive) or monitoring it from an installation above (non-invasive). Obviously, those sensors provide data limited to their static position.

When installed on a car or truck, MARWIS is a major advance in road safety by filling in gaps within a road weather observation network. It turns vehicles into driving weather stations by detecting several critical road and runway weather parameters. It can be installed on vehicles with a distance of 1 – 2m above the surface and delivers information about temperatures, water film heights, dew points, road conditions (dry, moist, wet, snow, ice), ice percentages, relative humidity and friction with a frequency of up to 100 times per second and a maximum output rate of 10Hz. It serves as an important decision support with regard to preventive gritting. Due to the open interface protocols, MARWIS can be easily integrated into existing winter maintenance monitoring networks. Similarly, the mobile road sensor can communicate directly with the control system on gritting vehicles via Bluetooth, RS485 or CAN Bus. The measurement data output supports the protocol UMB binary.