Snow squall alert: Hofstra's driving simulator uses virtual reality to show drivers how to navigate the hazard
Jase Bernhardt, associate professor of geology, environment and sustainability at Hofstra University, demonstrates a virtual reality program that simulates driving in a snow squall on Jan. 20. Credit: Barry Sloan
The pixilated sun shines as your vehicle cruises down the highway, which is emptier than the Long Island Expressway on its best day. Through the windshield a world appears and recedes in low-latency, stereoscopic depth.
Soon, alerts ping on your cellphone and a roadside electronic sign: snow squall inbound. Within seconds, visibility drops to almost nil. Your virtual hands grip the wheel but as the snow sticks, braking and steering become difficult.
A Hofstra University team created this snow squall driving simulator. Encountered through virtual reality headsets used for gaming and entertainment, it is intended to teach drivers about the dangers of driving through a squall. The fast-developing weather phenomenon is rare on Long Island, although it occurred at least twice here on New Year’s Day. The simulator is downloadable free at the Meta Quest store and a stripped down web-based version is available on a National Weather Service page.
"When you fully immerse people in the hazard, in 360 degrees, with surround sound, it’s so much more memorable and lifelike than seeing a video," said Jase Bernhardt, an associate professor of geology, environment and sustainability who led the Hofstra team. The interview last week came as much of the United States prepared for a massive snowstorm with possible snow squalls. "The idea is to revolutionize our outreach for severe weather hazards, go beyond a pamphlet or even regular video."
By inviting users to "actually act out what to do in real life, using actual body movements, you develop muscle memory, and that transfers to real life," he said.
Tens of thousands of users have downloaded the simulation, along with others Bernhardt and his colleagues previously made to replicate the experience of the landfall of a hurricane and rip currents. The team produced the squall simulation in consultation with National Weather Service meteorologists who have been researching squalls since the early 2000s and pushed for the creation of a snow squall warning, which the weather service introduced in 2018. Bernhardt said the simulation was produced relatively cheaply, using a $100,000 National Safety Council grant.
Brief and intense
Snow squalls, like summer thunderstorms, tend to be brief and intense, bringing a burst of snow instead of rain. The warmth of the road or friction of vehicle traffic causes the snow to melt. The snowmelt refreezes, turning the road surface to ice. "That's how a two-car fender bender turns into a 100-vehicle pileup with people being trapped," said John R. Banghoff, lead meteorologist at the Central Pennsylvania Weather Forecast Office, whose meteorologists have participated in the research and public messaging around snow squalls. Those pileups are associated with serious injury and death because of the entrapments, and they are characteristic of snow squalls, Banghoff said.
Recent surveys of drivers have suggested that many people, especially those 5 to 10 miles from home, are likely to continue driving after a snow squall warning, Banghoff said. "There's this sense ...'If I can just get home, that's going to be my safest spot.' That's common practice."
It's a bad and dangerous practice for anyone on a highway, according to the NWS, whose squall webpage warns that "There is no safe place on a highway during a snow squall." Drivers should either avoid traveling when a snow squall warning has been issued, or, if already traveling, "exit the road at the next opportunity."
The simulation, designed in consultation with NWS meteorologists, reinforces these messages. Midway through the experience, a highway exit appears; prudently pull off, and you "win." Keep driving and you crash, either careening into a vehicle pileup you can’t see until too late, or struck from behind by another vehicle whose driver can’t see you. There are no other outcomes.
Bernhardt and his colleagues worked with NWS meteorologists to ensure the verisimilitude of key elements of the simulation: sky conditions before and during the squall, rate of snowfall and rate of snowfall accumulation are all true to life, he said.
Snow squalls tend to be common around the Great Lakes, which interact with cold fronts sweeping down from Canada. Between 2017 and 2025, weather forecast offices in central and western New York and Pennsylvania issued about 400 snow squall warnings. By contrast, forecast offices here and in Connecticut issued 26, partly because the Atlantic Ocean tends to moderate temperatures.
Communicating danger
After the 2018 rollout of the snow squall warning, Banghoff and his colleagues looked for ways to viscerally communicate squalls' dangers to the public. Broad reach was key because many squall victims, like rip current victims, "don't live in areas where it's common for the hazards to occur," he said. "It's the people driving cross country from warmer locations" who tend to get caught.
Virtual reality afforded a safe facsimile of a dangerous experience and it's easily repeatable.
"People have daily life, the stresses of work, school," said Nelson Vaz, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Upton. "Weather is not really on the top of your mind ... unless you get stuck out there or have some type of vulnerability."
Snow squalls belong to a category of weather phenomena, like tornadoes or flash floods, that meteorologists call "short-fuse events." A squall warning typically gives drivers no more than 30-60 minutes notice — far less than slow-rolling, long-fuse events like the storm forecast for this weekend, whose days-long forecast window gave everyone time to prepare for the possibility of a foot of snow. "People can internalize that ‘I don’t want to be on the road,’ " Vaz said. "With the short-fuse event, people don’t have that training." The squalls, he said, "are in the sweet spot of dangerousness."
It’s plausible that virtual reality could sway driver behavior more effectively than text or images alone. But does it actually work?
Bernhardt’s research suggests it might. In a 2019 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, he and his co-authors wrote that 55 of 62 participants who experienced a simulated major hurricane landfall told researchers they would evacuate, while only 45 of 62 participants who did not see it responded affirmatively. They concluded that "simulation may show promise as a supplement to the general awareness social media posts and preparedness literature disseminated, in the offseason, for example, by National Weather Service Forecast Offices and other federal agencies."
Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.
Full coverage of the winter storm from NewsdayTV The NewsdayTV team was across Long Island monitoring the winter weather and what's next.
Full coverage of the winter storm from NewsdayTV The NewsdayTV team was across Long Island monitoring the winter weather and what's next.
