WeatherBrains 889: Ankle Bracelet For Highway Jerks

WeatherBrains Episode 889 is now online (January 30th, 2023). If you are crazy about weather, this is THE podcast for you!

Tonight’s show stemmed from a press release sent by Sandy Karps about the impact of weather and climate towards autonomous cars.

Tonight’s episode focuses on how and why Waymo is essentially employing their fleet of autonomously driven vehicles as mobile weather stations and what it enables. By combining Waymo’s autonomous driving sensor suite — complete with cameras, radar, and lidar —with high-quality ground-truth data from weather visibility sensors, Waymo’s engineers created a new quantitative metric about meteorological visibility that allows the Waymo Driver to generate estimates about the current weather and environmental states it’s operating under.

Our first Guest WeatherBrain is Daniel Rothenburg, who is the Technical Lead at WayMo.  We are honored to have you on the show.

The second Guest WeatherBrain joining us Waymo software engineer Michael James. Thanks for joining us.

Our email officer Jen is continuing to handle the incoming messages from our listeners. Reach us here: email@weatherbrains.com.

• How weather impacts autonomous cars (13:50)
• Use of artificial intelligence in the autonomous vehicle industry (33:45)
• How do autonomous vehicles react when entering a warning polygon? (01:07:00)
• What will the self-driving vehicle industry look like in the coming years and decades?  (01:14:30)
• Measurement comparing the current state of autonomous driving to the road safety record of the general public (01:17:00)
• The Astronomy Outlook with Tony Rice (01:26:00)
• This Week in Tornado History With Jen (No segment this week)
• National Weather Round-Up (01:28:30)
• E-Mail Segment (No segment this week)
• and more!

Web Sites from Episode 889:

What’s in the forecast: Using cutting-edge weather research to advance the Waymo Driver

Daniel Rothenburg Twitter

Picks of the Week:

Daniel Rothenburg – Link forthcoming

Michael James – Lasers as lightning rods just became a reality thanks to a new study

James Aydelott – Out

Jen Narramore – Out

Rick Smith – 2022 Severe Weather Year in Review

Neil Jacobs – SciJinks

Troy Kimmel – Out

Kim Klockow-McClain – Who’s Afraid of Driverless Cars?

Kim Klockow-McClain – The Perception of Risk

Bill Murray – Foghorn

James Spann – NWS Fort Worth Tweet concerning winter storm timeline

The WeatherBrains crew includes your host, James Spann, plus other notable geeks like Troy Kimmel, Bill Murray, Rick Smith, James Aydelott, Jen Narramore, Dr. Neil Jacobs, and Dr. Kim Klockow-McClain. They bring together a wealth of weather knowledge and experience for another fascinating podcast about weather.

Category: ALL POSTS, WeatherBrains