Patent ID: 7999702

Claim:
A method of determining weather information for one or more geographic areas, comprising: a) collecting weather-related data in conjunction with geographic position-determining data and vehicle equipment operation data at a plurality of road-going vehicles in the one or more geographic areas; b) receiving, from each of said plurality of road-going vehicles, a message comprised of said collected weather-related data in conjunction with geographic position-determining data and vehicle equipment operation data, along with corresponding time data, in a remote weather-determining system; c) processing said data received from said plurality of road-going vehicles in said remote weather-determining system to determine weather information for the one or more geographic areas, wherein said processing includes statistical processing of the vehicle equipment operation data by performing a majority vote decision related to a number of said plurality of road-going vehicles reporting windshield wiper on versus windshield wiper off conditions and/or evaluating a number of the plurality of on-road vehicles reporting wiper speeds at or above one or more thresholds, wherein said processing further includes using time-based weighting of reported windshield wiper speeds to generate precipitation-related weather information as an aggregate of individually reported wiper speed data; wherein the one or more geographic areas correspond to the position-determining data of said plurality of road-going vehicles, further wherein said remote weather-determining system comprises one or more processing systems, local control and monitoring interfaces, as well as communication interfaces to at least provide communication links to satellite and/or cellular based communications of said plurality of road-going vehicles, and wherein said one or more processing systems of said remote weather-determining system utilize a data aggregator to pre-process incoming weather-related data and vehicle equipment operation data such that it is broken out by geographic area of interest, and further utilize a joint data processor to jointly process the weather-related data, as aggregated by the data aggregator, for one or more geographic areas of interest; and d) transmitting the determined weather information from said weather-determining system to selected consumers.