The Finnish Meteorological Institute has published an open-source road weather model library

The Finnish Meteorological Institute's Road weather model is a physical model used to predict winter road conditions. Predictions made with the model are used to support winter road maintenance decisions. Accurate road surface temperature forecasts are important, as they help road maintenance personnel to do road salting at the right time and keep the roads safe for drivers. Recently, part of the road weather model source code has been published in the form of an open-source library. The library contains software used to predict the road surface temperature and the amount of water, ice, and snow on the road. By utilizing the library, it is possible for each user to develop their own program that predicts these basic road weather parameters. The library enables flexible implementation, as the user can add new features to their program without having to modify the actual library. The Finnish Meteorological Institute hopes that publishing the code will encourage other model developers to use the code and share the improvements to other users.

RoadSurf Road weather model library in GitHub

The open-source RoadSurf library has been published on the Finnish Meteorological Institute's GitHub page. A user manual and an example program for testing the library have also been published. In addition to instructions on how to use the library, the user manual gives descriptions of the physical functions. The library is programmed in Fortran and it is published under the MIT license. MIT license allows free use of the library both privately and commercially, as long as the source of the code and the license are mentioned. The library includes a C++ interface, which can be used to process the input and output data of the model in C++ language, although the actual model simulation is done with a Fortran program. There are several different road weather models in use around the world, but so far only the METRo model developed in Canada has been published as open-source.

More information

Open-source Road weather model library on Finnish Meteorological Institute’s Open Development GitHub-page Researcher Virve Karsisto, Tel. +358 29 539 5535, virve.karsisto@fmi.fi