NERC KE ERIIP Fellowship - Environmental risks to infrastructure: Identifying and filling the gaps

广泛的基础设施支撑着我们的日常生活，但我们对这些潜在脆弱系统的强烈依赖往往被遗忘。公路和铁路提供运输，管道输送能源和水，电缆传输和分配电力和通信。其中一些网络已有100多年的历史，而另一些网络则涉及全新的技术，但它们都存在潜在的环境危害弱点。最近由这种自然灾害导致的几起网络故障给人们敲响了警钟。例如，2014年暴风雨导致的Dawlish铁路坍塌，2014/15年度坎布里亚的房屋、桥梁和道路受损，2013/14年度萨默塞特洪水导致大范围停电。这些事件对人们的生活产生了深远的影响，也给当地和英国经济带来了巨大的损失(&gt；GB ms)。随着世界继续变暖，这样的事件可能会变得更有可能发生，也会变得更加激烈。在极端情况下，环境危害可能会对全球产生影响。例如，2010年冰岛Eyjafjallajökull火山喷发造成全球空中交通中断，但在此之前，火山灰对飞机发动机的影响并不被认为是一个重大风险。因此，有必要更好地了解环境危害对基础设施构成的风险。随着新技术的发展、新领域的探索和人口的增长，这一点尤其重要，因为我们经历了气候的变化。这项奖学金旨在通过确定我们知识中的差距并评估未来的研究如何填补这些差距来帮助解决这一风险。重要的是，这一奖学金得到了几个行业组织的支持，这些组织直接参与评估自然灾害对广泛基础设施构成的风险。拟议的工作将涉及与这些专家一起花费时间，以了解潜在的影响、吸取的教训，以及正在进行的和未来的研究如何在评估环境风险方面做出真正的改变和改进。首先，该奖学金将确定航空业是否遗漏了任何关键危险，如冰岛火山灰云及其对航空旅行的影响。潜在危险的清单将由一个联合学术和行业小组编制和评估。这可能包括新的危险，例如海底通信电缆被水下泥沙雪崩(“浊流”)破坏。这类电缆传输了全球99%的通信，包括重要的金融数据和互联网。极端事件是很难预测的，因为自从有准确的记录以来，我们通常没有经历过很多(如果有的话)。尽管如此，它们可能是最具破坏性的事件。该奖学金将探索不同的技术和工具来预测和评估极端危险，例如开发更常用于医学或金融研究的新统计方法。这些工具将需要包括未来气候变化的影响。通常，个别大型事件可能不会破坏基础设施，但较小自然灾害的综合或连续影响可能是灾难性的。在这里，建议总结从一些基础设施所有者、顾问和承包商那里学到的教训，以了解我们如何更好地了解复合或累积影响，以及如何为未来的模型开发提供信息。就像你去看医生进行健康检查一样，了解基础设施的健康状况也很重要。在历史上，这是通过面对面检查来完成的，但现在技术的逐步变化使远程和实时监控成为可能。将总结可用于监测自然灾害及其对基础设施的影响的新技术。研究人员和行业代表将结成一组，看看我们如何为行业定义实时监测环境危害的最佳实践，并提高此类努力的成本效益。

A wide range of infrastructure underpins our day-to-day lives, yet our intense reliance on these potentially vulnerable systems is often forgotten. Road and rail provide transport, pipelines carry energy and water, and cables transmit and distribute power and communications. Some of these networks are over 100 years old, while others involve brand new technology, but all of them have potential weaknesses to environmental hazards. Several recent network failures caused by such natural hazards have provided a sharp wake up call. Examples include the Dawlish railway collapse due to storms in 2014, damage to homes, bridges and roads in Cumbria in 2014/15, and flooding in Somerset leading to widespread loss of power in 2013/14. These events had profound impacts on people's lives, as well as large costs (>£Ms) to the local and UK economy. Such events may become more likely and more intense as the world continues to warm. In extreme cases, environmental hazards can have global implications. The 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland, for example, caused worldwide disruptions to air traffic, yet prior to its occurrence the effects of ash on aircraft engines had not been considered a major risk. Thus, there is a need to better understand the risk posed by environmental hazards to infrastructure. This is particularly important as we experience changes in our climate, as new technology is developed, new areas are explored, and populations grow. This fellowship aims to help address this risk through identifying gaps in our knowledge and assessing how future research can fill them. Importantly, this fellowship is supported by several industry organisations that are directly involved in assessing the risk posed by natural hazards to a wide range of infrastructure. The proposed work will involve time spent with those specialists, to understand the potential impacts, lessons learned, and how ongoing and future research can make real changes and improvements to assessing environmental risk. First, the fellowship will determine whether industry has missed any key hazards, such as the Icelandic ash cloud and its impact on air travel. An inventory of potential hazards will be compiled and assessed by a joint academic and industry panel. This may include new hazards such as the breakage of subsea communication cables by underwater avalanches of sediment ('turbidity currents'). Such cables transport 99% of the world's communications including important financial data and the internet. Extreme events are difficult to predict as we have not typically experienced many (if any) since accurate records have been kept. Despite this, they can be the most damaging events. The fellowship will explore different techniques and tools for predicting and assessing extreme hazards such as developing new statistical methods that are more often used in medicine or financial studies. Such tools will need to include the effects of future climate change. Often, individual large events may not damage infrastructure, but the combined or successive effect of smaller natural hazards may be catastrophic. Here, it is proposed to summarise the lessons learned from a number of infrastructure owners, consultants and contractors to understand how we can better understand compound or cumulative impacts, and how that can inform the development of models in future.In the same way as you go to the doctor to get a health check, it is important to understand the health of infrastructure. Historically this has been done by in-person inspections, but step changes in technology now enable remote and real-time monitoring. New technologies that can be used to monitor natural hazards and their impact on infrastructure will be summarised. Groups of researchers and industry representatives will be paired up to see how we can define best practice for industry in real-time monitoring of environmental hazards and increase cost-effectiveness of such efforts.