WIREDGOV

Weather has a major impact on every stage of a construction project from design to scheduling work or hiring equipment. With this in mind the Met Office is launching a new and unique service.

Location Based Reports will provide bespoke weather reports that accurately reflect onsite conditions giving contractors increased confidence in weather information allowing them to identify potential downtime, develop contingency plans and negotiate realistic contracts.

The Location Based Reports offer site specific weather information to contractors and are available in two forms: Location based monthly planning averages and Location based monthly downtime summaries.

The reports use weather information from over 3,600 locations, where previous reports have used information from 100 weather stations. To create the Location Based Reports the Met Office has combined Long Term Average values from the historic gridded database with a database of present observations used to drive the supercomputer forecasting models. The new system has been rigorously tested over a year to verify its robustness. The Met Office is confident in the strength of the new reports and the value they offer.

These new reports provide a greater representation of actual construction site conditions and allow contractors to get weather reports specific to their site location rather than the nearest weather station. They include data on up to 16 different weather elements such as daily rainfall totals, minimum air temperature, days with air frost, maximum wind gusts, mean wind speed, humidity and snow depth.

Eleven of these weather elements have Long Term Averages and 1-in-10 year values generated for them. This means that the reports can be used across a variety of construction contracts including NEC clause 60.1 (13). They will help to more accurately identify compensation events, inform the tender process and help contractors understand and prepare for weather related risk.

John Faragher, Met Office Construction Business Manager, said: "These reports are the first of their kind in the industry and will make a real difference thanks to their extremely accurate reflection of onsite weather conditions specific to individual sites".