History (METRo)
From Documentation
[edit] A product to help road maintainers
The canadian road weather station network is composed of more than 200 road stations accross the country. Since Canada is a wide country, the length of road the maintainers must covers during one shift are important, hence a road forecast of only 3 hours wouldn't be sufficient: a minimum of 24 hours is required in order for a road forecast to be useful.
The developement of a software addressing those problems was the goal given by the Governement of Canada to their meteorological specialists at Environment Canada. The resulting software was labeled METRo, a bilingual acronym for:
- French: "Modèle de l'Environnement et de la Température de la Route"
- English: " Model of the Environment and Temperature of Roads"
[edit] METRo Labeling
The evolution of METRo during the last years had given three version number:
- METRo 1: The first version have been written in 1999 by Environment Canada as a proof of concept. Is was run between 1999 and 2005 on an operational basis for the Ontario and New Brunswick provinces.
- METRo 2: In 2004, it was rewritten to be a standalone software and now uses only free software libraries and code. It has run on an operationnal basis during the winter 2004-2005 and 2005-2006, replacing METRo 1.
- METRo 3: In summer 2006, the authority of Environment Canada has granted permission to distribute METRo under the GPL license. The community of meteorologist (operational and academic) and road maintainers will be able to use this software to help them in the forecasting of road condition. The release under the GPL license gives the community a free and accessible tool to compare and evaluate the existing models of road forecasting. Thus, this version of METRo have been labeled METRo 3
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