AfricaWeather Railguard
What is AfricaWeather RailGuard?
Track conditions are influenced by ambient conditions and the environmental impact of weather can lead to unsafe field conditions for rail operators. Support staff working on track sections, electrical infrastructure, signals and support facilities are exposed to inclement and sometimes dangerous weather conditions in the fulfilment of their duties.
AfricaWeather RailGuard provides insight into conditions that impact the safe running of railway operations. Warnings are given prior to any adverse impact on your business due to our pro-active notifications sent directly to appropriate operations and field staff. This allows rail operators to implement preventative measures to avoid losses and to speed up the application of remedial measures after any weather effects.
AfricaWeather RailGuard uses an online portal to give you the most up-to-date weather intelligence specific to your infrastructure. We provide the ability to include the weather risk management information in your control room with automatic refreshing of the information. Your field staff can access this portal on the web and their mobile phones so they can have weather intelligence in the palm of their hands wherever they are. It's plug-and-play, with no need for additional software or hardware. Furthermore, we provide free training and support.
How AfricaWeather RailGuard helps your business
Real-time notifications
Our storm tracking tool allows us to track where severe weather is located and headed over the next 60 minutes, as well as what time the storm will hit your infrastructure. Lightning strikes are tracked in real time and we position each strike relative to the infrastructure of our customers.
In the event that we determine a spatial and temporal match between any severe weather event and your infrastructure, we generate an alert message and deliver that message to your specified members of staff. We serve both the operations centre and field staff with these alerts.
Nowcasting
We allow you to customise your weather view with our layered viewing. You can also combine weather and map data pertinent to your operations. View radar, satellite, storms and observed weather lightning from a national to a site-specific scale. This customisation allows you to optimise weather-related decisions.
Accurate weather prediction
We secure weather forecast information from the best sources in the world and present all forecasts to you in highly functional, simple to digest formats. We advise our customers up to a week in advance of rainfall predictions in 6-hourly time slots and, the type of rain they can expect. Our forecasts for temperature and wind are presented in an hourly graph for the weeklong forecast period.
On-site stations
We install weather stations with probes for temperature, rainfall, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and humidity to the field. These measurements allow us to increase the accuracy of all forecasts issued and to set boundary conditions for minima, maxima and movement parameters.
The stations can also include remote cameras to bring the field conditions into your control room, you can actually see what is happening in the field from your central decision-making location.
Specific condition alerts
You can set alerts for specified weather conditions and set custom messages for temperature, wind, and other critical parameters, warnings, or advisories. These parameters are included in our continuous monitoring systems. As soon as we observe a forecast or an on-site observation matching any specified weather condition, we spring into action to notify the specified members of staff of the condition.
Safeguard your people and your assets
We have worked with the railway industry to define operational interventions that can be implemented once any real-time or specific condition alert is sent to your staff. These interventions result in a safer working environment that will reduce your exposure to incidents.