Project starts with summarising the present state-of-the-art of global climate models, emission and climate scenarios, effects of climate change on the road network, winter indexes, and the key factors and calculation methods in constructing those. A database of possible future road condition scenarios is developed using archived historic RWIS-data, and combining those with widely accepted climate change scenarios. Observations from the Swedish and Finnish RWIS stations will be collected from national Road Administrations from as long time span as has been archived with homogeneous contents and quality. Target is to get 10 years of observations of air and surface road temperature, moisture, wind speed, rainfall amount and precipitation type.

In the next step, the raw archived observational data will be processed into regular interval time series. The Finnish and Swedish data will be reformatted to similar data format. Climate downscaling is performed to establish the climate database. The phase-space method to select the historical analogue days matching the future days will be developed.

The second phase will develop and test a winter index technique to evaluate such things as the spatial variations of winter maintenance needs as well as the cost/benefit of various winter maintenance strategies. With the help of the databases and index calculations, other types of weather related events, such as strong winds, heavy precipitation, flooding, freezing and thawing, can be mapped and assessed. With well-defined interfaces, the new system can be easily adapted to other countries outside the project test areas in Sweden and Finland. Possibilities of using road weather data from other countries will be investigated.