Winter gritting is an essential aspect of winter highways maintenance, part of the legal duty of the highways authority to “ensure that, as far as reasonably practicable, safe passage along a highway is not endangered by snow or ice.” Suffolk Highway’s winter service plan draws on guidance from the National Winter Service Research Group’s Practical Guides to ensure defensible good practice in undertaking these duties. Winter gritting involves the spread of sand and salt mix on approximately 50% of the county’s roads in accordance with a treatment protocol matrix, and minimises ice formation on these roads. This is undertaken in accordance with a weather forecast provided by a specialist service based on data from twelve weather stations, and is currently implemented in four geographical domains.

This report investigates the potential to install road surface temperature sensors at a greater geographical frequency, to provide the local authority with additional information on road surface temperature, to inform winter gritting decisions on a more granular basis. The sensors investigated are “lower cost” than existing full weather stations, covering an order of magnitude price range. Five suppliers provided road surface temperature sensors to the project. The report details and investigates the data returned from the sensors, and makes conclusions and recommendations based on the data analysis.