Mobile road weather sensor calibration by sensor fusion and linear mixed models

Mobile, vehicle-installed road weather sensors are becoming ubiquitous. While mobile sensors are often capable of making observations on a high frequency, their reliability and accuracy may vary. Large-scale road weather observation and forecasting are still mostly based on stationary road weather stations (RWS). Though expensive, sparsely located and making observations on a relatively low frequency, RWS’ reliability and accuracy are well-known and accommodated for in the road weather forecasting models. Statistical analysis revealed that road weather conditions indeed have a great effect on how the observations of mobile and stationary road weather temperature sensors differ from each other. Consequently, we calibrated the observations of mobile sensors with a linear mixed model. The mixed model was fitted fusing ca. 20 000 pairs of mobile and RWS observations of the same location at the same time, following a rendezvous model of sensor calibration. The calibration nearly halved the MSE between the observations of the mobile and the RWS sensor types. Computationally very light, the calibration can be embedded directly in the sensors.