Met Office collaboration
Overview
Trackplot has been working with the Met Office since 2023 to develop and deliver a range of weather related services to our customers including a Severe Weather Warning Service, Weather Conditions for individual lone workers at their current location and Personal Severe Weather Notifications.
This case study describes our journey from idea conception through technical development to launch of the services and how we worked with the Met Office during this project.
The business critical issue
Trackplot focuses on protecting outdoor lone workers. Frequently operating in rugged, demanding environments their jobs intrinsically carry higher risks. Often they are also beyond the reach of mobile phone coverage and this lack of communication adds another layer of complexity if the lone worker gets into difficulty.
The Trackplot team wanted to help employers anticipate and prevent health and safety problems arising and in 2022, after consultation with customers, identified that environmental hazards and severe weather conditions were critical factors to track to keep outdoor workers safe.
The significant driver behind this initiative is the impact of climate change on the UK weather: increasing weather intensity increases risks for outdoor workers and will impact negatively on safety.
Predictions by the Met Office for 2070 compared to 1990 warn that winters will be between 1 and 4.5°C warmer, up to 30% wetter and the intensity of rain will increase by up to 25%. Days when rainfall exceeds 30mm per hour will happen twice as often.
How the Met Office helped
It was clear that Trackplot needed to provide customers with both current and future weather conditions to assist real-time incidents and allow customers to be weather ready by predicting and preparing for future situations.
The Met Office was chosen as a provider for a variety of reasons: their datasets are readily accessible through their specialist Data Provisioning Team, their range of datasets is growing providing Trackplot with scope to add more functionality in the future, the use of Open Government Licence (OGL) and other flexible licencing agreements, and of course their reputation… the Met Office is recognised by UK government as the national weather warning service for the UK and would be widely accepted by Trackplot’s customers.
Trackplot selected the Met Office’s Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) for the delivery of weather warnings and DataPoint to display the actual weather conditions for an individual lone worker at their current location.
Development and testing progressed over a 9 month period and Trackplot launched the new services in March 2024. This complemented the existing real-time Environmental Mapping functionality launched earlier in May 2023 which provided Trackplot’s customers with current conditions including rain, temperature, wind, Fire Weather Index and active fires. In combination this comprehensive suite of current and future environmental and weather conditions allows customers to plan ahead and prevent accidents at work.
The Data Provisioning Team provided a high level of support, advice and encouragement and a comprehensive API to enable a real-time feed. It was straightforward working with the Met Office to find the right solution and then implement it. The area depicting a Severe Weather Warning provided by the Met Office API was very detailed and one of the challenges to overcome was how to most efficiently, without putting an unnecessary load on our servers, display this in an interactive online map.