As anyone who has lived in rural northern New England can attest, mud season can make even the most mundane trip into town a grueling affair.
But while muddy conditions may create a major inconvenience for drivers trying to commute to work or get their kids to hockey practice, it can make or break a mission for military personnel in contested areas.
Fortunately, a new software tool called the “Mud Threat Score” now provides military planners with real-time frozen ground and thaw predictions at 30-meter resolution, anytime, anywhere in the world.
Developed by U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) laboratories and their Hanover, New Hampshire-based industry partner Creare, the new tool combines existing weather forecasting data residing within the geospatial decision support tool GeoWATCH with newly developed frozen and thawing soil algorithm to highlight locations that are experiencing or will experience muddy conditions due to the spring thaw.
The ability to predict mud risk helps military decision makers better understand the operational impacts of weather on ground vehicle mobility, especially those operating in cold climates.
“Imagine you were planning logistics that required offroad driving five days in the future,” said Dr. Theodore Letcher, a research physical scientist at ERDC’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL). “You may know that the ground is frozen now, but let’s say it’s early March and there is warm weather in forecast. The Mud Threat Score will help you assess whether the predicted warm up will pose a risk to your planned mobility operations. You could use this information to postpone your planned logistics or otherwise modify your plans.”
Recent history has shown just how crucial knowing when the ground will hold — and when it won’t — can be to modern military forces.
“The importance of this capability was illustrated by Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” said Dr. Jerry Bieszczad, principal engineer and partner at Creare. “Russian forces were greatly hindered by the Russian army’s failure to account for the widespread mud conditions that immobilized their tanks and other ground vehicles.”
With that in mind, the development team’s goal was simple, according to Creare’s Bieszczad.
“Enable heavy vehicles to move from point A to point B without getting stuck in the mud.”
At its core, the Mud Threat Score keys in on areas where unfrozen soil is sitting on top of frozen soil, an important component of mud season. According to Letcher, it is the only metric that attempts to directly “predict” where mud season is occurring or may occur in the next few days, based on standard weather forecast data.
The Mud Threat Score is the latest enhancement to the Geospatial Weather Affected Conditions and Hazards tool, better known as GeoWATCH.
Launched in 2013, GeoWATCH is a geospatial decision support tool that merges real-time coarse resolution (10km pixel size) weather data with high resolution (sub 100m pixel size) static data layers to generate real-time predictions of soil strength and vehicle mobility anywhere in world almost instantaneously. GeoWATCH was jointly developed under a Phase I/II Army SBIR contract by two ERDC laboratories – CRREL and Coastal & Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL) – and Creare.
“Instead of only having semi-static information about the terrain, GeoWATCH gives mission planners the capability to account for dynamically changing environmental conditions like whether the ground is wet or snow covered,” said Dr. John Eylander, a former CHL research physical scientist who is now CRREL's acting Research and Engineering Division chief.
“It used to take teams of individuals months to generate analyses for limited areas, but GeoWATCH provides users the ability to create forecasts of soil strength and mobility in only seconds,” said Eylander.
Mud season is a characteristic part of spring for millions of people across the globe. However, it’s often a short-lived phenomenon that varies in its timing and severity every year. That transience has made it difficult to characterize and plan for.
But Letcher believes the Mud Threat Score will advance future frozen ground and thaw research.
“Now that we have this metric, we can not only use it to predict mud season in real time, but we can also use it to compute climatological statistics about mud season for various regions around the globe,” he said.
For example, researchers can look at mean timing and severity and how mud season is changing over the years and link those variations to known global circulation patterns.
“This is a great first step toward better understanding the spring thaw and its impacts on all manner of operations, both military and civilian,” said Letcher. “My hope is that we can continue to refine and develop the tool as we get additional validation data and customer feedback.
“This is a textbook example of how to effectively use ‘big data’ to provide a solution to a relatively common problem.”