Business

Meteorology

Severe weather

Weather forecasting

Service (business)

Nowcasting

Biology

Storm

Marketing

Geography

Computer science

Environmental science

Genetics

Drone

Progress in Aerospace Sciences

Weather phenomena including wind, rain, fog, storms, etc. have large influence on road transport by reducing the speed and capacity by 5–40% in moderate cases and up to 100% in case of extreme weather situations. The existing weather service systems cannot provide accurate local weather nowcasting, because of their prediction processes, and a lack of actual measured information in the atmospheric boundary layer. Technology is ready for the development and introduction of drone-based mobile automatic weather stations to support improved road weather management. This systematic review evaluates the readiness of the required technologies through surveying a wide range of papers dealing with the introduction of drone based meteorological measurements and their utilization for road weather management. It identifies the requirements of such systems, analyses the applicability of drones for weather monitoring and nowcasting, studies the required specification of drones and their instrumentations and investigates the possible realization of planned measurements. The review results show that (i) significant societal-economic value can be generated with the improvement of nowcasting and forecasting systems for road users (ii) technology is ready for the development and introduction of new road weather monitoring and management services, however UAV weather tolerance must be improved (iii) new concepts and software solutions are required for processing the measured data and rapid sharing of nowcasting information.

Review of using small UAV based meteorological measurements for road weather management