WISLINE Wind, Ice and Snow Load Impacts on Infrastructure and the Natural Environment

Main Objectiv:

• To quantify climate change impact on technical infrastructure and the natural environment caused by strong winds, icing and wet snow.
  

Sub-objectives:

• To improve the description of cloud microphysical processes of importance for simulating atmospheric icing.
  
• To quantitatively assess future wind and ice design loads on electric transmission lines in different geographical regions in Norway.
  
• To establish risk assessment models for weather hazard induced damages on forests.
  

Project Summary

Strong winds, atmospheric icing and heavy snowfall are weather phenomena that can cause severe damage to technical infrastructure such as the electric power grid as well as natural environments such as forests. The objective of WISLINE is to improve predictions and design values of atmospheric icing, heavy snowfall and damaging winds in the current climate, and to provide quantitative estimates of changes in these parameters in the future, for evaluating the changing risks of forest wind throw and disruption of technical infrastructures, in particular the electric power grid. In order to meet this objective, the project will: 1) Improve the description of physical processes in the atmospheric models, enabling a better quantification of icing and heavy snowfall events; 2) Establish improved post-processing and bias-correction methods for better assessment of icing and damaging winds. That will serve as input to impact models for analysis of icing on electricity transmission lines and wind-throw and breakage in forest stands in a future climate. 3) Apply the improved physical parameterizations, post-processing tools and bias correction methods, carry out high-resolution simulations of icing conditions and damaging winds in future climates; 4) Develop post-processing tools that can enable users to make better decisions with respect to future weather challenges. All datasets and results of WISLINE will be open to end-users (scientists, forestry management, infrastructure owners, planners, and the public). Open access to data will be made available through data distribution systems operated by MET in order to support public and private sectors to adapt to climate change. MET Norway will through its core mandate, extend the results demonstrated in the project into its base datasets for current and future climate in Norway.

Important documents:

Accepted proposal: wisline_soknadrevidert.pdf
Project description: wisline_proposalny.pdf
Progress plan: wislineprogressplanny.pdf
Notes from kickoff meeting: referatwisline_11march15.pdf