The impact of weather on our interdependent infrastructure networks

Infrastructure, such as our roads, rail, electricity supply, and information communication technology networks can be severely impacted by weather causing disruption for customers, and costs for the owner/operator, the insurance sector, and ultimately for the national economy. Our infrastructure services are interdependent, and a failure in one sector leads to failure in other sectors. For example, the flooding of an electricity supply substation in Lancaster in December 2015 left the city without power for over 30 hours and affected all critical infrastructure including road and rail transport, ICT, water supply, and emergency services (Ferranti et al. 2017). Extreme weather events (e.g. Storm Desmond) receive greater notoriety, but often relatively non-extreme weather (e.g. spring sunshine, Ferranti et al., 2016) or combinations of weather types (e.g. persistent rainfall, followed by heavy rainfall, or high winds and rainfall) also impact infrastructure.

This PhD will combine industry datasets (e.g. Network Rail, Highways England) with meteorological datasets to understand the types of weather that cause maximum disruption to the infrastructure provider, with a particular focus on identifying weather conditions that cause disproportionate impact across multiple infrastructure sectors. Understanding the interdependencies between infrastructure networks, and considering our infrastructure as a system-of –systems is essential to make our current and future planned infrastructure resilient to weather and longer term climatic change.