A Network of X-Band Meteorological Radars to Support the Motorway System (Campania Region Meteorological Radar Network Project)

Abstract

The transport sector and road infrastructures are very sensitive to the issues connected to the atmospheric conditions. The latter constitute a source of relevant risk, especially for roads running in mountainous areas, where a wide spectrum of meteorological phenomena, such as rain showers, snow, hail, wind gusts and ice, threatens drivers’ safety. In such contexts, to face out critical situations it is essential to develop a monitoring system that is able to capillary surveil specific sectors or very small basins, providing real time information that may be crucial to preserve lives and assets. In this work, we present the results of the “Campania Region Meteorological Radar Network”, which is focused on the development of X-band radar-based meteorological products that can support highway traffic management and maintenance. The X-band measurements provided by two single-polarization systems, properly integrated with the observations supplied by disdrometers and conventional automatic weather stations, were involved in the following main tasks: (i) the development of a radar composite product; (ii) the devise of a probability of hail index; (iii) the real time discrimination of precipitation type (rain, mixed and snow); (iv) the development of a snowfall rate estimator. The performance of these products was assessed for two case studies, related to a relevant summer hailstorm (which occurred on 1 August 2020) and to a winter precipitation event (which occurred on 13 February 2021). In both cases, the X-band radar-based tools proved to be useful for the stakeholders involved in the management of highway traffic, providing a reliable characterization of precipitation events and of the fast-changing vertical structure of convective cells.

Evaluating the Influence of Data Entropy in the Use of a Smart Equipment for Traffic Management at Border Check Point

“…The research was guided to a traffic management of cargo flows in the BCP area. The data regarding cargo vehicles is obtained using dedicated sensors and is used to develop the new traffic management system and logical model associated [5][6][7]. In some cases, the required data is obtained from external sources such as crowdsourced data to create freight corridors using the connection between vehicles and smart equipment installed on transport infrastructure [8].…”

The Impact of Meteorological Conditions and Agricultural Waste Burning on PM Levels: A Case Study of Avellino (Southern Italy)

“…As per Table 1, which lists the AURA stations involved in our work showing their geographical coordinates, the AURA monitoring devices are located at different altitudes and therefore provide very useful information about the vertical profile of PM within the PBL. We integrated the AURA dataset with the meteorological data collected by five automatic weather stations (AWS), managed by the nonprofit organization MVOBSV-Mount Vergine Observatory with the support of the University of Naples Parthenope [29]. As revealed by Table 1, four of these AWS are colocated with air quality PMSA003 devices (AVC, ME, SU and MP).…”