Innovating for weather-sensitive activities
The constant improvement of our weather and climate forecasts meets many challenges, particularly in terms of safety when it comes to alerting public authorities and the population of the arrival of a hazardous phenomenon or forecasting weather conditions at airports, and economic when a company needs a very detailed forecast to organise its activity.
A new platform developed by Météo-France and Atos allows producers and aggregators of green electricity to better forecast their production in France and Europe. In the context of climate change, this new service is part of Europe's objective of having 32% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.
Available via extranet, this service provides probabilistic forecasts of winter phenomena (storms, extreme winds, freezing fog, sticking snow, etc) and is aimed at electricity transmission system or rail transmission system operators. The aim is to help them anticipate the risk of frost and snow deposits on cables, cable breaks or pylon falls during tempestuous events and extreme winds.
This service indicates the timing, location and intensity of expected phenomena, allowing the company to make network operating decisions and mobilise human and material resources to intervene at the right time, in the right place and in an efficient manner to restore systems and limit the duration of damage.
This prediction is based on the Arome Ensemble Forecast and incorporates state-of-the-art business algorithms. The system operator can thus monitor and assess the risk associated with winter phenomena using surveillance maps, probabilistic scenarios (optimistic, median or pessimistic) or threshold exceedance probabilities, and wind gust return duration maps.
Renewed in June 2019, the framework contract sets the terms and conditions of a partnership started in 1998 for the next five years. Météo-France provides daily information that enables SNCF Réseau to target and anticipate weather and climate risks in order to take appropriate measures and guarantee the safety of passengers and staff. With this new contract, the scope of services is extended. In addition to the services already provided, Météo-France will provide SNCF Réseau with a refined warning and alert service on weather hazards and will feed raw information flows into the SNCF Réseau big data platform, enabling us to start imagining, in a collaborative mode, what Artificial Intelligence will make it possible to implement and improve within the framework of this partnership.
Météo-France has been appointed for operational assistance for Aristotle Forest Fires. This consortium of 15 partners, selected by the Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC), is to set up and operate English-language operational assistance to estimate the impacts of extreme natural hazards at the European and global scale. Météo-France, represented by its Commercial Department, is involved in two types of hazards: forest fires and extreme weather events. After training and a demonstration during spring and summer 2019, Météo-France will provide its forest fire service from May to October 2020 on the European level.