Weather on Wheels is being developed by students with the assistance of faculty and staff at the Conrad Blucher Institute (CBI) and the Coastal Bend Business Innovation Center both at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

 

We hope to make long road trips safer for all. Storms, snow, icy roads, heavy rain, dense fog, and severe crosswinds can make for extremely hazardous road conditions. These weather events cause over a million crashes every year resulting in about 6,000 fatalities and half a million injuries (US Department of Transportation). 

 

Weather on Wheels makes it easy and fun to check out weather predictions before you hit the road. Enter your starting location, destination and start time and Weather on Wheels will display weather forecasts along your entire route. Feel free to adjust your start time to find the best possible conditions for your trip.

 

Weather on Wheels combines forecasts from the US National Weather Service  and route information from Google Maps. The concept of Weather on Wheels is based on prior work at the CBI which included the Texas Coastal Winds app and the app Transit Time which was created to plan vessel transit through the Houston/Galveston Ship Channel.

 

As compared to other available tools, our app is solely focused on the predicted weather along potential routes and should make it easier to plan drives around bad weather. We will continue to improve the app at least through summer 2015. Let us know what you think. All suggestions are welcomed!

 

The creation of this app is also the story of students from TAMUCC's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Computer Science programs working with Business and graphics arts students from the Innovation Center. For the long term, we are hoping to continue developing and maintaining this app and others through a non-profit funding process. Alternatively TAMUCC is actively working to bring its innovations to the public and the free market. Its Coastal Bend Business Innovation Center is a hub that has already been highly successful at guiding entrepreneurs and projects of all sizes and, who knows, this app could be on the list for future commercialization.

 

This application was developed as a result of research conducted at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.