We are proud to provide a sustainable, affordable, clean and safe water supply and to manage and treat the waste water returned to us in a way that protects the environment.
| Northumbrian Water Globe Project | Sustainable operations centre at Hanningfield | Weather radar station |
Northumbrian Water, the Met Office and the Environment Agency have invested more than £1 million in building a weather radar station which will provide the three agencies with vital and comprehensive rainfall data and help in the fight against flooding.
The advanced equipment constantly sends and receives signals, reading 25,000 one-kilometre grid locations every five minutes and provides up to seven million readings a day from across the northern operating region.
Thorough testing of the radar has been carried out since the completion of its construction in August 2008. The station, which observes rainfall across the entire region, records where, when and how hard it is raining as well as how quickly areas of rainfall are moving. This helps to evaluate the likelihood of heavy rainfall and the risk of potential flooding.
A 6.2 metre diameter cream ball (radome), made from double-skinned fibre glass with a foam centre, protects the ‘eyes and ears’ of the weather radar and is raised off the ground by an 11 metre galvanised steel tower.
Our secure High Moorsley site has been chosen for its central location in the North East which is ideally located to provide excellent radar coverage of the major urban areas including those most vulnerable to flooding. Surveys have been carried out and confirm that the weather radar poses no risk to health or the environment.
Weather radar adviser at the Met Office, Bill Wheeler, said: “Climate change will bring with it the risk of more extreme rainfall in the future. This latest addition to our radar network will allow us to better forecast heavy rainfall and the risk of potential flooding across the North East.”
David Chapman our climate change manager, said: “Severe and localised rainfall presents many challenges. The weather radar is a huge step forward in our ability to collect rainfall data and will allow us to have a better understanding of the performance of our sewerage network in times of heavy rainfall.
“Rainfall data, which will be loaded into our database every hour, will equip us to investigate storm patterns in more detail and help us to better prioritise and design flood protection schemes.”
2009 saw the opening of the new operations centre at Hanningfield Water Treatment Works, near Chelmsford, built to bring together a number of different departments within one purpose built, sustainable facility.
The new building, named Sandon Valley House following an employee competition to name the building, was designed by FaulknerBrowns and constructed by ISG Jackson. It incorporates a number of innovative sustainable features to minimise its impact within its setting and achieve an excellent environmental rating.
The three-storey building boasts a water source heat pump, which utilises water from the nearby Hanningfield Reservoir to provide heating and cooling throughout the building via a 'chilled beams' system. The surrounding landscaping has been designed to harvest rainwater for use within the building and water efficient appliances have been fitted. Special panels provide solar shading for the building, which itself is specifically oriented on site to reduce the energy demand for cooling.
It is predicted that the use of renewable energy sources on site will result in a 38 per cent annual CO2 reduction for the new operations centre.
Essex & Suffolk Water Property Manager, David Alborough said: “(the centre) will enable us to be greener and more efficient as an organisation.
“The building will also help us build upon our existing links and bring us closer to the local community. A facility will be available within the building for the use of the local community and our aim is that the food served in the canteen will be sourced locally”.
Peter Woodnott, director of ISG Jackson's Commercial division, commented: “One of the greatest challenges with Essex & Suffolk Water’s new operations centre was to design and build a structure that wasn’t compromised by its commitment to environmentally sustainable technologies. The building will not only meet the high expectations of the client in centralising its commercial operations, but also set the benchmark for all future sustainable buildings.”
The building has achieved an excellent BREEAM rating, an assessment which provides authoritative guidance on ways of minimising the adverse effects of buildings on the global and local environments whilst promoting a healthy and comfortable indoor environment. In the UK BREEAM has been widely accepted as representing best practice and is the world’s longest standing and most widely used environmental assessment method for buildings.
The GLOBE Programme encourages pupils to measure aspects of their local environment and report their results over the Internet. Data from schools around the world is then available for pupils to use in a wide range of projects and activities.
The Northumbrian Water Globe Project is a collaboration between Northumbrian Water and the GLOBE Programme. We are putting a network of weather stations into schools in areas where weather data is sparce to provide useful information on storm events, as schools are generally situated in the correct locations to give wide regional coverage.
The schools benefit from an international project that cuts across curriculum areas such as geography, science, maths, ICT and PSHE and citizenship. There are links to all the key stages right up to university level. They will be monitoring temperature (max, min, current temperature), precipitation (rain and snowfall), clouds (type and amount) air pressure etc. The information automatically uploads to the GLOBE database and schools can look at their own information as well as that of the other participating schools.
NW will have access to the weather data collected which will be used in prediction of storm events etc. the weather information will also be available via our website.