ORT0007 - Environmental Sensor Stations

National Highways needs to monitor weather conditions across its road network to inform operational decisions to mitigate the effect of severe weather, in particular, the correct application of treatment to the road surface in winter to ensure it is safe for road users and workers. There are currently 250 environmental sensor stations (ESS or weather stations) installed in key locations across the strategic road network that provide a wide range of weather observations every 10 minutes. Most of the current ESS technology is around 20 years old, based on an obsolete model, and reached the end of its design life. Faults are growing leading to an outage in observations and thus no data to inform decisions making them less effective. The increase in faults requires unplanned maintenance on the road network to resolve issues with the technology. Inaccurate weather data may impact National Highways’ safety and have the potential to cause significant delays and disruption to the network. Investment ensures that reliable weather observations can be obtained across the road network. In the long term this environmental and weather data may have commercial applications for National Highways. The requirement is to invest in the replacement of 125 ESSs