Protecting UK infrastructure from landslides triggered by climate extremes

Background

Landslides impact the railway network on average three times per week, and their frequency has increased by >50% in the last ten years. This risks significant disruption to the rail network and can lead to major events (e.g. 2020 Carmont accident). ‘Risks to transport networks from slope failure’ have been identified as requiring more action in the last UK Climate Change Risk Assessment. Landslides are generally triggered by intense rainfall and occur in earthworks that have been weakened due to their age and/or due to unusually wet or dry recent weather. The exact nature of the rainfall that triggers a landslide event is currently unquantified, and there is uncertainty its future change and how resultant risks can be effectively managed. In this PhD you will aid climate change adaptation by quantifying the character of rainfall that drives landslides and develop methodologies to combine, communicate and act upon the uncertainties in future extreme rainfall and earthworks condition.

PhD opportunity

The project will involve:

• Developing methodologies to estimate the condition of rail earthworks based on deterioration over their lifetime and their variability by month, which is primarily controlled by recent weather
• Quantifying the intensity and duration of rainfall that might cause a rail earthwork failure by analysing past events and utilising existing engineering and statistical models
• Using climate model projections to quantify the future change in UK seasonal rainfall variability and individual storms
• Using statistical methods to quantify and combine the cascade of uncertainties in rare event prediction.
• Determining usable formats to communicate landslide predictions and their uncertainties to different stakeholders, from engineers to non-technical managers through testing with project partners.
• Using expert elicitation to explore how identified risks and uncertainties can be managed and acted upon effectively.
• Exploring how the management of and learning from present day risks can be effectively integrated into medium-and long-term climate adaptation strategies.
• Applying new understanding of present-day failures to future climate to aid climate adaptation and new infrastructure design

Outputs will include (1) methodologies and tools to quantify the likelihood of future landslides, which are also applicable to other risks such as flooding and/or wind storms, (2) new codes of practice to assist earthwork asset managers in making decisions about landslides on the transportation network, (3) evidence for how rare event early warning can be integrated into organisational risk management, (4) best practice examples of how emergency planning for present day failures can feed into long term adaptation strategies.

You will be supervised by three members of academic staff from University of Leeds, experts in weather and climate science, adaptation science and civil engineering. You will also work closely with partners from the rail industry and Met Office.