The Greater Manchester Combined Authorities (GMCA) have a responsibility to their residents to maintain the highway in a safe condition during the winter maintenance period. Each authority uses a number of specialised services and equipment that require a high degree of reliability and consistency in delivery to inform winter managers of forecasted weather conditions.

The service will comprise of a Bureau Service as detailed below:

A computer service to interrogate the Weather stations on the following basis:

- ADSL – 10 minute intervals

- 3G/4G frequency of data transfer to be confirmed but expected every 10mins

- Interrogate and upload data and images at minimum 10 or 20 minute intervals where weather

station cameras are installed (depending on communication type)

- Provide live streaming camera images from weather stations with ADSL communications.

Weather Station Maintenance Service

The weather station operation and maintenance service is categorised as the following:

- Urgent and non-urgent repair works i.e. Cyclic and reactive maintenance

- Pre-winter period inspection and calibration of weather stations

- Winter period data calibration check

- Enhancements and modifications

- Weather station maintenance and repair costs will be the responsibility of each individual

AGMA Authority and will be dependent on the specification and number of weather stations

within and owned by that authority

The system should provide the following functionality that enables the user/s to manage their condition monitoring, forecast provision and decision making process-based on recognized standards ie NWSRG and Appendix H of Well Maintained Highways, including planning treatment of routes, distribution of decisions, recording actions taken, to provide a complete audit trail for each decision on each treatment route.

This service should be available as a fully integrated option to the main bureau visualization suite.