Bridge Weather Applications

The hazards of ice, wind and low visibility are compounded on bridges. For this reason, Vaisala delivers a package of products and services to help road authorities to manage the special hazards of bad weather on bridges. These include a specially designed bridge-deck sensor that measures bridge surface state, temperature and depression of freezing point. We also provide wind measurement systems that process standard parameters (average, gust, direction, speed) and trigger alarms when they are exceeded. Vaisala's present weather sensor, the PWD11, provides both roadside visibility measurement and precipitation classification (e.g. frozen/non-frozen). The IceCast system can also be brought into play to monitor bridge data in real-time, archiving it for future reference.

Options include our Thermal Mapping service, which is especially useful in finding locations for bridge sensors. Vaisala NowCasting offers a fully automated, 3-hour forecast of bridge surface conditions (temperature and state) so that operators can deal with icing hazards in good time, before they become serious.