Meteomatics Supports Anglian Water to Get River Positive

The water company utilizes Meteomatics’ weather data to track and predict how weather events impact its key infrastructure. In this use case, learn how our precipitation data is helping Anglian Water analyze its storm overflow data and investigate its compliance with the goal of preventing events such as pollutions, leakage and water quality incidents.

Anglian Water: Supplying Water and Water Recycling Services to Seven Million People in England

Anglian Water is the largest water and water recycling company in England and Wales by geographic area, covering an area of 27,500km² in the East of England. The company’s mission is to provide safe drinking water to the seven million people served in the region and to contribute to the protection and enhancement of the environment by providing effective wastewater management. The company cleans a billion liters of used water each day (approximately 400 Olympic size pools) before returning it to nature.

Underpinned by its Purpose to bring environmental and social prosperity to the region, Anglian Water’s consistent efforts have been recognized with various awards, including the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Sustainable Development category. In 2022, they joined forces with Severn Trent, a water company serving Central England and Wales, to create the Get River Positive plan. It consists of five commitments necessary to keep rivers clean and ensure they can thrive.

Managing Weather Data Was Challenging for Anglian Water

The nature of operations of the water industry requires a large number of weather data sets to inform decision-making. Anglian Water needs to be able to rely on accurate weather forecast data which are easy to implement and manage.

However, for a long time, Anglian Water relied on several weather data providers which were complicated. Stakeholders were confronted with data discrepancies and inconsistencies that affected the decision-making processes and brought financial and administrative challenges. Another problem was that with different providers, data had to be collected in different ways, which required considerable technical efforts and was time-consuming.

For those reasons, the company decided to streamline its operations by replacing most of its previous providers with Meteomatics. In 2018, Meteomatics became Anglian Water’s predominant weather data supplier, and the Weather API was quickly integrated into the company’s business units. Our data is available in formats that work with their existing products and services while meeting the needs of the Data Science team.

Thanks to our wide range of data sources, historical weather data and open-source connectors, users immediately gain insights to add to their existing workflows and data infrastructure. Since the beginning of our partnership, Anglian Water has made significant savings, and around 200 employees now have the flexibility to access weather data on-demand to support tactical decision-making.

Meteomatics Helps Anglian Water Mitigate the Impact of Extreme Weather on Key Infrastructure

Anglian Water utilizes our weather data to track and predict how future weather events may impact its key infrastructure. Data equips them with a better understanding of which assets are at most risk under certain weather conditions, meaning they can take proactive action to prevent events such as pollution, leakage, and water quality incidents.

Whilst precipitation data is paramount, other parameters are also analyzed to help protect their infrastructure from extreme weather events, such as temperature, wind, humidity and lightning.

Ensuring Storm Overflows Do Not Harm Rivers

For example, weather data allows teams to better analyze storm-water regulators data to ensure that storm-water regulators and sewage treatment works do not harm rivers, which is the first commitment of the Get River Positive plan.

Storm-water regulators are designed to act as relief valves when the sewerage system is at risk of being overwhelmed during heavy downpours when a lot of rainwater runs into drains and the sewerage system over a short period. As part of its commitment to Get River Positive, weather data is being used as part of a custom visualization tool to help predict storm overflows and mitigate impact.

By combining storm-water regulators data (when and where there has been a discharge) with precipitation data, technicians can better understand the context within which the water recycling center (WRC) is operating. The inclusion of rainfall data is vitally important to enable the manager or technician to understand whether the flows and events are in response to wet weather or due to something else which must be investigated.

This is important because the permits governing the use of the storm-water regulators are dependent on why Anglian Water discharged. To be compliant, it must be due to rainfall or snowmelt within the WRC catchment. Meteomatics data shows us that rainfall activated the sensor, meaning that the overflow remains compliant.

Alessia Onnis, Data Scientist at Anglian Water, stated: “Now that we have all the information we need in one place, it has significantly improved the time taken to investigate the potential breaches.”

A Center of Competence for Weather API users

Given Anglian Water’s heavy usage of our Weather API, we worked closely with the team to help develop a center of competence in the organization on how to use the API and apply the results. When weather data needs to be applied to a new business use case, Anglian Water quickly onboards new users and deploys the Meteomatics' API, greatly increasing time and cost efficiency.

A Renewed Partnership

Anglian Water is one of our oldest partners, and we are happy to announce that we have recently renewed our partnership for another three years.

We are proud of the relationship we have been building since the beginning and thankful for the continuous trust Anglian Water has in our services to help make decisions that affect sustainable development projects and improve the well-being of the communities across East Anglia.