Eleven years of RWIS operation in Lithuania: possibilities for the use of the data collected

Abstract

Climatic conditions of the Republic of Lithuania make a large influence on the design, construction, repair and maintenance of road structures. In 1999 Lithuania started developing the Road Weather Information System (RWIS) which is based on meteorological stations installed on motor roads. The RWIS has been operating in Lithuania for already 11 years. The number of meteorological stations has been increasing every year, the system itself has been gradually improved. At present Lithuania has 48 meteorological stations. It is planned that in future the number of stations will be expanded to 100 (Cilsius 2010). To store and process climatic parameters, recorded by the meteorological stations in 2003-2004, the specialists of Road Department of the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University created a special database which stores all the recorded data. During all the years more than 5 million data has been stored in the database. The database is continuously supplemented with the newest data allowing characterization of different territories of Lithuania in the aspect of climatic regioning. In order to get as much useful information as possible and necessary for the road design, construction, repair and maintenance, this article describes possibilities for the use of this database.