Carmarthenshire County Council

Through our own digital transformation funding, Carmarthenshire is in the process of replacing 2 outdated weather stations with 5 new internet connected stations. For the future, we have identified locations for new weather stations to allow us to refine further the regional weather forecasting and allow us to improve our winter service response. There are clear safety and environmental benefits as well as operational and budget efficiencies. The data from the weather stations is collected on site and transferred via mobile data to a bureau service, then shared with our weather forecaster. We do also share this data with our neighbouring authorities already via this bureau service and make use of data from their weather sites as well. As we move to further refine our weather domains we would be looking to introduce some more stations, including solar powered stations in remoter areas. Essentially the more we have the more focussed our service can be as it will provide us with robust, repeatable and measurable data to monitor against. The data gathered from these stations can easily be shared with other authorities and shared information across borders, regionally or nationally, would provide broader models to improve forecast accuracy.

Discovery evidence

Carmarthenshire has 850km of roads that receive winter treatment, approx a third of hte total highways network. The decision to execute a gritting run is based on national forecasts and with limited local data, caution must be taken and the gritters may be deployed when not necessary. Improved access to local conditions can improve the forecasting models and either avoid unecessary runs or focus on selected routes. Each full run costs the authority around £10,000 in salt, vehicle and driver costs. The improvements already being implemented is expected to avoid around 4 runs per winter. Further refinement on regional forecasting could contribute to only deploying partial runs on selected gritting routes according to the risk factor. This data is easily shared to create a wider network of weather stations to improve these models naationally and aid the decision to deploy gritters.