ENVIRONMENT & SUSTAINABILITY
et
Weather is going to have an increasing effect on the railways so is going to play a bigger and bigger role in infrastructure and operations planning, due to changes in the climate and the UK’s meteorological conditions. RTM spoke to Met Offi ce rail manager Steven Wallace to fi nd out more.
e a T
he railways often fi nd themselves a victim of the weather in this country, especially as
it’s not just extreme storms and fl oods than can cause disruption – plain old British drizzle and leaf fall can cause low adhesion and traction/ braking problems, while overhead lines are often affected by ice in the winter and heat stress in summer.
The Met Offi ce is hoping to offer more services to rail customers to help them with both immediate and longer-term planning for such weather. Steven Wallace, who manages such partnerships with railway businesses for the Met Offi ce, spoke recently at the eighth UK Light Rail Conference in Manchester.
The Met Offi ce and its partners already work with Network Rail, Scotrail, Translink Northern Ireland, Nexus in the North East and others, he said.
Changing climate, changing weather Specifi c services
Speaking to RTM after the event, Wallace told us: “Over the next 15, 20, 30 years, Network Rail’s parameters are going to have to change, because weather is going to change. Down south, you could see a shift over the next 30 years of as much as 10 degrees. So what does that means for the rail industry and what are you going to do to mitigate that risk?
“You might have done a lot of scoping surveys and planning based on the current climate, but as we move forward, that climate is going to change. It’s not a prediction, it’s actually happening. We can see the changes in weather that have occurred over the last 50 years and
82 | rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 13
He explained: “The technology we have in place for the rail industry can offer a high-defi nition, 360-degree view in real time, and forecasts over 24, 36 or 48 hours of what the weather’s going to be like, right down to 1.4-kilometre domains. We can tell them exactly what the weathers going to be within that domain.
“There is a public website,
apply a model to that, looking at the low, medium and high carbon output scenarios and what the climate is going to look like over the long term. The rail industry plans 10, 15 and 20 years down the line, and we can assist as to what the weather’s going to look like in future years.”
He said the biggest threats included drizzle, because of the oxidisation effects on the tracks causing low adhesion, and leaf fall (one of the better-known problems, despite it being seen as something of a joke in the national press), which causes similar effects – extended braking distances, overruns, SPADs, loss of motoring performance and increased journey times. Wind, lightning and ice/heat stress on overhead lines are also common problems.
“It’s not just in the winter that we see extreme weather, we also see it in the summer,” Wallace said.
the National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS), that we’re obligated to provide as a government body. That gives a very generic feel of the weather and a top-down overview.
“But when your parameters are more specifi c, say with leaf fall for the rail industry, that’s something we can tailor for you and offer a bespoke service for your routes and so on.
“We take a unique environmental dataset, couple that with a weather forecasting dataset, put the two together and we can say that the leaves are going to fall off the trees at this date.”
It can also offer data on the likely effects of more complex weather phenomena, such as the ‘weather blocking’ that was a major cause of March’s freezing weather.
“We’ve seen blocks of weather ‘stuck’, so this year we didn’t get January and February’s weather until March, because the winds and jet stream weren’t picking it up and pushing it across. We’ve seen a lot of weather coming in from the east rather than the west.
W
h t h r
v
a
w t h
r
e
e e
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100