Webinar 54
Kentucky’s GIS and Road Weather Management

February 19, 2025

Summary of the Federal Highway Administration’s Quarterly Webinar

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) promotes geographic information systems (GIS) as a means to manage and improve transportation systems more effectively. One of the ways that FHWA does this is through its GIS in Transportation program,¹ which identifies timely and critical GIS issues and topics in transportation and connects transportation agencies with available resources and best practices. The webinar summarized here is part of a quarterly series organized through the GIS in Transportation program.

Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) discussed how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play a vital role in KYTC’s Road Weather Management. KYTC presenters were Will Holmes, GIS and Big Data Branch Manager, Office of Information Technology and Erica L. Russell, ITS Technical Team Lead, Team Kentucky.

KYTC developed a traffic, roadway and weather management system, GoKY, that is used to keep the public informed in a timely manner and for better decision making. GIS is the foundation for the spatially accurate data that allows KYTC’s team to visualize and analyze weather-related impacts in real time during events. By integrating real-time and historical data, roadway conditions, and traffic patterns, GIS empowers the Road Weather Team to make safer and more informed decisions. The presenters discuss the history and development of the system, the various data sources consumed, including how they are an early adopter and delivery to the Work Zone Data Exchange (WZDx) and partner with WAZE. Demonstrations of GoKY’s real-time functionality, dashboards, and partner capabilities are also presented.

A recording of the webinar is available. Please use passcode T*SCA%0% to access it.

Questions & Answers

It was mentioned that you are looking at ways of using some of the crowdsource data and checking it. How fast is that sort of validation happening?
Our AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location) system goes every two minutes and looks for verification from data sources. It depends on the interval of the data source. WAZE interval is about every 15 minutes. So we look to see if there is a reliability score to reinforce the report from another source. We have found we are not getting a lot of false positives verifying this way. There can be some spatial error in Waze, because a person reporting has already driven by, so GoKY has buffer zone around reported error.

It looks like the dashboard you were showing with all the different weather feeds was on Google? Are there costs associated with the weather data displayed?
Yes, we utilize Google Looker. We purchase some traffic data like HERE, but not weather data. It is APIs provided by our partners.

When looking at KY Mesonet data, how is that able to be consumed? Do they have a rest service or is it a script in the background consistently pulling from a file?
We have set up API that we pull data from it.

As someone who has sent work zone notices to WAZE, I’m a bit disillusioned that the WAZE folks trust crowdsourced into over the very specific info we send them. What the public thinks they are seeing as they drive by is not always reality. Is there a way to resolve that disconnect?
We use the Waze sift and check every two minutes to see if the incident still exists. If there is only one report of an incident, we don’t use it.

Do you find data from COCORAHS (Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network) as accurate as US Geological Survey (USGS) precipitation data?
We think it is a great companion to USGS. COCORAHS is crowdsource data. USGS sometimes has specific areas they go to, so COCORAHS helps expand out for more detail. Using the two together creates a greater picture.

Return to top