View our exhibit from the AREMA conference. RAL has spent most of its 25 years of existence addressing transportation problems. The lion’s share of this R&D has been focused on aviation applications and more recently on highway operational applications. Railroads are now beginning to request more advanced weather technologies to focus on either very complex problems or highly localized problems that affect the safety of their crews or the efficiency of their operations including overall capacity within their railway networks.
Over the years this transportation mode has been serviced by several U.S. and Canadian organizations, primarily in the private sector. This service overall has been quite good particularly in terms of presentation and communications to the end user. There are however several complex problems that will never be addressed with a high level of accuracy and reliability without an investment of several years of R&D and expenditure of significant funds which are beyond the reach of most private sector firms.
Some of these problems include track buckling that results from a combination of several factors (weather, track bed characteristics, maintenance, volume of traffic, etc.), railcar blow-overs induced by high crosswinds, and track washouts that may be induced by highly localized precipitation that may have occurred several miles away from the railway. Diagnosis of these events is very difficult and prognosis of them today is characterized by very low probability of detection and very high false alarm rates.
RAL has been very active in promoting R&D programs for the railway industry for many years and has collaborated with the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology (OFCM), Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), American Association of Railroads (AAR), NOAA and several railroads. A symposium was co-hosted by NCAR/RAL, FRA and AAR in 2001.
More recently RAL has worked with Canadian Transport Canada to bring together a Railroad Weather Research Collaboratory (RWRC) made up of Transport Canada, FRA, Environment Canada, NOAA, NCAR, and several railroads to begin to focus on prioritization of railroad weather-related problems and identification of relevant research to address those problems. The basic idea is that these very difficult problems cannot be solved without joining together, pooling resources and sharing the results for the common good. The RWRC is in the formative stages and is expected to become fully active in FY07.
Contact: Rich Wagoner