Drivers will no longer have to guess at driving conditions on the Crown Range Rd after the installation of a state-of-the-art weather station and road webcam this month.
The joint venture between the Queenstown Lakes District Council, MetService and New Zealand Transport Agency is expected to be online and operational by mid-July and will offer drivers and road contractors a live feed of road conditions on New Zealand's highest sealed road.
MetService new business development manager Peter Fisher said the solar powered automated weather station would be installed next to the summit car park and would monitor wind speed, rainfall, wind direction, wind gusts, air temperature, humidity, dew point and other associated weather data every minute.
He said embedded road sensors measuring the road temperature and the road surface would be transmitted through a buried cable to the weather station and a high definition panoramic web camera would provide images of road conditions that were refreshed every four minutes.
As part of the project, very high resolution road weather modelling of the Crown Range Rd broken down into 30m sections from Cardrona to the Gibbston Highway would also be provided.
''I'm not aware of any other place in the southern hemisphere that utilises this modelling; this is cutting-edge science.''
This information would also help roading contractors know exactly where it was going to get really cold and where they would need to process the road, he said.
MetService has a network of about 200 automotive weather stations around the country, 50 of which were for NZTA, but this is the first weather station put in by a district council, the first one not on a state highway and the first one for the Crown Range.
''Because we didn't have a weather station there before, we had to estimate the weather using satellite images, radar imagery and information from nearby weather stations, but this is really going to help us with our snow warnings and forecasting for the area generally,'' Mr Fisher said.
A QLDC spokesman said the real time webcam imagery will be added to the QLDC Morning Winter Road Reports, available free every morning in winter via email, text message and social media.
