The Central Wisconsin Airport in Mosinee is a hub of activity for northern and central Wisconsin, allowing people to get where they need to go.

Unfortunately, this region of the country is prone to frequent bouts of winter weather that leave pavement surfaces slippery—not great when you have to get planes to land, so the folks at CWA have to watch the forecast carefully.

"Essentially what we look for in a weather forecast is what sort of precipitation are we going to have, uh, what sort of visibility are we going to have," says Tony Yaron, airport manager at Central Wisconsin Airport.

So what’s the airport’s strategy in handling the wintry mess?

"We go into it with the idea that we're not going to close the airport and keep it so that we don't close it down, and [we] haven't had to do that,” says Yaron.

"Essentially, what we need to do is keep our runway surfaces to the highest degree of friction possible so that we've got a good braking action to allow the aircraft to land properly."

There’s actually a way they measure the friction levels on the runways and other pavement surfaces there: it’s called a decelerometer.

It’s a small, box-shaped machine that sits in the passenger’s seat of a vehicle; the vehicle drives on the runway, accelerating and braking at various points.

Every time the vehicle brakes, the decelerometer takes a reading called the coefficient of friction; and the lower that is, the more slippery the runway.

The crews at CWA closely monitor these readings and adjust their clearing operations as needed.

They have quite a fleet to work with, too, including giant snowblowers, trucks for de-icing, and gargantuan plow trucks.

But there *are* certain weather conditions they can't clear away.

This past Christmas was an example of that.

"We had very dense fog over that period and, uh, caused a lot of cancellations," says Yaron.

But as far as they can help it, they do their utmost so that you get where you want to go right on time.