ENVIRONMENT & SUSTAINABILITY
“We can make these forecasts and tell the rail industry, ‘it’s going to be quite a warm December, but March is going to be particularly cold’. So maybe without that knowledge they would have scaled back resources and so on coming out the tail end of winter, but in fact we can tell them to prepare for unusual weather in March and April, what you would have thought would be coming January and February.”
Preparing for major events
“Then there are the big weather anomalies,” Wallace said, “like the wind we got in Scotland in 2011, or the snow and ice we saw in Scotland a few years ago affecting the main route between Glasgow and Edinburgh, which was shut off for a couple of days.
“We can predict when these incidents will probably occur – these ‘one in a hundred year’ events.
“We can put extreme weather into context, and the climatology and what we’ve seen over the past decade suggests that looking forward, we can expect weather events of that size to happen about one in every ten years.”
Rail-specifi c information
Most weather-related issues are common to both light and heavy rail, Wallace said, from wind to lightning strikes. So light rail operators and transport bodies are also keen to make use of the Met Offi ce’s services, Wallace suggested.
The ‘OpenRail’ web client (pictured), for
example, was developed with the Met Offi ce’s customers to show rail-specifi c information via an interactive map showing rail stations and rail lines, weather layers of interest, infrared satellite data, and rainfall radar imaging.
Weather elements can be colour-coded for clarity, and text warnings are also available.
The services tend to be completely bespoke to each operator or rail business, Wallace said, with different organisations having different priorities in terms of the data they’re most interested in. “That’s simply because of the geography and the topography in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and different parts of England,” he explained.
“It is so varied. On a basic level, the south west of England has more problems with fl ooding while the far north of Scotland will suffer more from extreme temperatures. It’s all unique, bespoke data – every service is tailored, and people in different parts of the county want to know different things.”
www.metoffi
ce.gov.uk/railways FOR MORE INFORMATION
rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 13 | 83
Below: A demonstration of ‘OpenRail’, showing rail surface temperatures (purple is -3C, blue -1C, red +1C), with an overlay showing rainfall in blocky colours.
Left: An example of a leaf fall prediction service.
Above: Warnings by route based on NSWWS – e.g. Network Rail Scotland.
Right: Forecast information on periods of high heat can help rail organisations plan for the risk of rail buckling, for maintaining staff comfort and in organising procedures for vehicle break-downs.
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